APACHE: Spacewalking in Virtual Reality

At NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, one lab uses the virtual reality environment to study how astronauts perform on spacewalks. They use sandboxes, multi-directional treadmills, and even mockups of spacesuits to simulate the spacewalk environment in ways that other facilities can't. The data they gather on human health and performance could have an impact on future deep space exploration by mitigating risk.

What is said in the film

Here at the Johnson Space Center, we specialize in preparing astronauts for the complexities, dangers, and challenges that human spaceflight presents. A team of engineers and scientists here have been using the assessments of physiology and cognition in hybrid reality environments, or APACHE lab to study how VR training can better prepare our astronauts for future EVAs or spacewalks on the lunar and eventually Martian surface. There certainly are dangers in the lunar surface, but there are dangers on the space station. So when we go outside the space station and we do a spacewalk at any minute, your suit could malfunction. It could be your suit or your buddy’s suit.

So that could be anything from, you know, your buddy has a seizure and they're not conscious to you have a suit malfunction and you've got higher CO2 levels and they're not mentally functioning well, or they have a hole in their suit and they're on 30 minutes of oxygen, and you need to get back to the airlock before those 30 minutes expire. So we practice this, we practice this in the VR lab. We practice it underwater in the NBL. It's one of the driving things that we actually make sure that the astronauts can do this successfully before they are signed off to go on a space mission. As we move to the Artemis missions.

They're going to look a lot different. We're going to have an unprecedented number of extravehicular activities and not only in number but in length. So we're going to be asking astronauts to do a spacewalk day after day after day. And so what we really need to understand is the psychological and physical demands of doing that. So we developed VR immersive, capabilities to kind of augment the, the training we do in mock ups and physical trainers, for instance, the NBL, the Neutral Buoyancy Lab astronauts are full suited there in the water.

They have mock ups, but they don't have the visual cues. Right. So virtual reality is perfect for that because you can create, you know, a space environment with all the correct models and the correct lighting conditions. You know, you're orbiting the Earth, every hour and a half. So 45 minutes light, 45 minutes in darkness.

You can simulate everything down to, you know, a millimeter of accuracy in a virtual environment so astronauts can train for spacewalks where they pick up their tools. You know, how they do their communications back with the ground in the cupola. And, so immersive environments important for that. To really help our crew and to help our flight controllers on the ground, we're trying to build predictive models. So what the crew might be, after they've gone three hours into the spacewalk, four hours in the spacewalk.

How fatigued are they? And to get these kind of predictive models, you need a lot of data. And we can get a lot of that data in our VR environments, which is not as easily obtained in the spacesuit environments where it's a lot of overhead, a lot of personnel. It's really hard just to get a test up and running with the VR environment. We can do 2 or 3 tests in a day and just get through a lot more subjects, a lot more data is collected and it really helps kind of just build those performance models for our crew.

So there's a lot of ways to test Eva, concepts and tools and procedures right now. And unfortunately there's no one stop shop for everything. There's limitations and implications within each of these testing environments or scenarios. So we look at something like the Neutral Buoyancy Lab or NBL, for example, as we put people in these, lunar offloaded scenarios and have them walk and do things, their motion is impacted by the water drag that they have to fight in the pool. So that becomes kind of a limitation from a physical workload perspective.

When we do testing out in field based environments, like Arizona, for example, there's been groups to go out there and do some different research and testing. We find that we don't have access to the actual pressurized spacesuit, but we have the realistic terrain and environment where we can do navigation, we can do realistic geology. You just lose the physical burden of the spacesuit. And in any environment, again, looking at like building nine and being an Argos, for example, though, you are in an actual spacesuit and pressurized, you're in a warehouse type environment and there's a catwalk, with tour people from, from the space center and they're walking by and waving and having a good time. And so that can be distracting sometimes.

For us, it's a lot of the same kinds of things here in our virtual reality environment. Some of the benefits are we can recreate tools and concepts and procedures and drop them right into the simulation, but we can actually put somebody on Mars so that they can do realistic navigation. They can get a feel for where they're actually at on the lunar surface or the Martian surface or wherever it may be, and really drive that immersion and cognitive workload, which we think is also a really important aspect for Eva. My primary role within this group, I lead the spacesuits and exploration operations team within the Human Physiology, Performance Protection and Operations, or H3PO lab. A lot of the work that we do and are interested in is characterizing and understanding how an astronaut crew member is doing, fairing and performing while they conduct extravehicular activities or spacewalks.

So this building, building 21, it's one of the newest buildings at JSC, was built about six years ago. And when it was being designed and built, we were spread out across multiple buildings across JSC. And one of the goals, especially of this wing of the building, was to help us to integrate more closely. And so H3PO was the first lab to actually be an integrated lab. And so we're able to work with the other groups in the building, such as the Behavioral Health and Performance Lab, the Neurosciences lab, and the Anthropometric and Biomechanics Facility.

So these different groups that are that are in the building, we're able to work together to really solve these operationally relevant problems that we face with spaceflight, in particular, Eva, in this case. We're in the APACHE space within the NASA Johnson Space Center. And, we've built a VR environment to be able to look at, cognitive and physical workloads that we would see during exploration operations. And so we can, walk around, on a treadmill within VR, which is what we call traversing, and then also work within a sandbox allows us to do a little bit more of the geology tasks and maintenance tasks. And so it's, all encompassing environment that we're developing within a virtual and hybrid reality environment.

So we find virtual reality to be really helpful in our Eva testing and research. Because, as you might imagine, getting actual access to a pressurized spacesuit and a partial gravity analog like the Neutral Buoyancy Lab or the Active Response Gravity Offload System, or Argos, it's really challenging. So for us, it's really important that we can simulate as many great aspects of Eva as we can in a rapid, controllable and repeatable test environment. And that's really one of the beauties of virtual reality is that, not only can we recreate anything digitally and add the different, tools and functions and widgets and heads up displays and whatever else we might need, but we can actually drop somebody right there on the surface of the moon of Mars and see how they perform in the actual environment. So that's one of the reasons we need a testbed like this.

We're going to test a whole bunch of different scenarios. We're going to identify what we recommend to deal with each emergency situation. And then when we have a lunar crew who's assigned to go on this first lunar mission and land on the moon, we'll start training them probably in these same environments, to go save themselves and save their buddy. And so this is both a testbed and it's a training resource. And yeah, I would say I mean, any time you get on top of a rocket or you are in your spacesuit and you open the hatch to the vacuum of space, there is definitely, a level up in your head that says, why am I doing this?

And what decisions should I make in my life? That led me to to this point? But the point is, we're professionals, right? We are trained for this. We accept the risk.

It's not just us that accepts risk. All of NASA accepts the risk, and everybody at NASA takes that seriously. And this is why we do this testing, and this is why we do this training. And the amount of testing hours and training hours that go into a single mission is incredible. But that's the reason that we do that.

We don't want to put anybody's life at risk, unnecessary. So we are definitely taking risk, but we are accepting the risk and we are mitigating that risk wherever we can. So you can think of this entire area actually as risk mitigation. This is making us safer. We know it's going to be dangerous, but this is bringing that danger level down because we're testing here and we're training here.

So today I'll be participating in the CO2 walk back study, as we call it. During Eva, one of the things that spacesuits must do is get rid of the carbon dioxide that humans are producing, while they're breathing and doing work. In certain cases, we may be far away from the safe point or habitat on the lunar surface, and the spacesuit could fail in certain ways that would cause the CO2 to build up in the suit. And so the question that we're really trying to answer is how much CO2 can build up before we start running into real issues. And so what we're doing in this study is trying to understand at what level of inspired carbon dioxide, do we start to become able to do that contingency walk back, to get back to safety and to protect our crew members?

And so with the findings from this data, this study will help inform, requirements, potentially for what the spacesuit will have to do and manage by way of CO2, to keep the crewmembers safe and those contingency scenarios. So one of the first things that we will be doing, safety first, we will be donning a, safety harness strap. What we see is when we put people in virtual reality, sometimes they'll kind of lose, the notion of where they are at in the physical world, and they can, start to trip over themselves. And so we don't want anybody to trip and fall. So first thing, we've got a safety harness that we put on and walk through.

Second thing that we are doing after that, is donning a, a mock, hard upper torso or HUT, as we call it. Spacesuits don't fit everyone perfectly. They are adjustable. And since we're doing a study that's looking at some of the respiratory physiology here, in some cases, certain crew members may not be able to take a full kind of complete breath in the spacesuit because of their size as well as the sizing of the spacesuit. And so we're trying to emulate some of the impacts that we might see from limiting, their, their respiration.

So at this part, what we're doing is kind of cinching down, again, simulating that feel of not being able to potentially take a full breath. We are, for this study, a little bit on the conservative side and kind of making everybody do that. And that's not necessarily true for everybody. But part of the thought is that, if the findings from this study are, riskier on the ground, then we may be able to have margin back. That basically better protects the crew in flight.

And so trying to cinch that down, trying to limit within a reasonable degree, the kind of fullness of a breath that someone's able to take. So next, we're going to be donning some physiologic sensors. Bioinformatic sensors are what we look at is more of a discipline. So it includes, sensors and instrumentation to collect, for instance, physiology data. In our case, crew members or astronauts, and then also how we collect that data and also visualize it.

So that's kind of all encompassing for what bioinformatics is. We've got a number of sensors that will be putting on today. The first one where we're getting a lot of our data is a metabolic analyzer. And so we'll be putting on a mask, we'll be measuring everything that I'm breathing in as well as what I'm putting out, which also includes the gas blend that we're providing to the subjects as well, that does have different levels of CO2. And depending on the specific test point that we're looking at.

So we're looking at things like ventilation and respiration, consumption of oxygen, production of carbon dioxide, etc.. Also, you'll see that we are putting on some transcutaneous CO2 monitors. So trying to understand what are the levels of CO2 in the body, how is that building up over time? We also have heart rate as a measure of physical workload. And that can also tie, to CO2.

And we might see some different impacts on the workload and the body's response to different levels of CO2. We also have a forehead sensor as well, looking at, oxygenation in the blood as well. We don't want people to become too hypoxic, during this as well, because of the gas blends that we're providing. So we're constantly monitoring basically a lot of the normal vitals that you would see, when you go to the hospital or something of that. So now that we've got all of our sensors on, we're ready to collect all of our scientific data and measures.

The next thing we're going to be doing is putting, getting into VR into virtual reality. And so for this simulation, we were simulating a contingency walk back on the lunar surface. We're pretending that the crew member is some max distance away from safety. They're going to have to walk along the lunar surface, generating that workload, building up the CO2, in the spacesuit effectively. And we're trying to see if they can get back all throughout that, while on every so often we're being asked questions about, how are we feeling?

Do we have any symptoms like dizziness or nausea or headaches? Let's start with the headaches zero to seven such are well known symptoms, reported in the literature for CO2. Additionally, as we're going through VR, every so often, we'll be administering a cognitive test called the digital symbol substitution test, where we kind of are looking at some different parts of, cognition and trying to understand, are there any mental or cognitive impairments just because physically you can handle the levels of CO2 that are building up in the spacesuit, cognitively you may not be able to, and we don't want our crew members getting lost or unable to complete certain contingency or emergency steps or reacting to, say, a caution wearing system or whatever they may be doing in this case. So trying to understand what's the impact on both the physical, response towards the cognitive response of the subjects as we go through this simulated walk? So bearing this walk back, we are simulating this on the lunar surface.

So this map is recreated from, different satellite or lidar type data, and we've kind of recreated that map 1 to 1 with one of the potential landing sites that we expect to see on the moon is basically we create what the buzzword is digital twin right of the environment. It's a math model and a simulation environment, and all the correct graphics that make a virtual digital twin of, you know, whatever space systems they're, they're training for or want to experience. So, to make the user feel really immersed, need to create the environment. And for the, for the moon, the terrain. Right.

The terrain and the lighting conditions as real as possible using real empirical data. Right. So real data from the LRO mission, heightmap data and real lighting data, all at the intensity of the sun, the brightness, the lumens, the size of the sun. So create that real environment and then add to that, digital twins of any subsystem that's on the moon, the suits you have, the rovers. You might have habitats in the future.

You have tools, you have a tool cart. So we have the graphics models for all that so we can recreate that. And then you drive your immersive graphics environment with data from those real digital twins. So it's real data. So things are moving correctly with the correct dynamics.

And the correct motion and kinematics and dynamics of that real system. So when you put all that together, either the astronaut this in a training environment or if you're doing it for analysis, you get it was close to the real world as you can get. So at this point, I'm just now completing, the hour long, simulated walk back. We've gotten all of our measures. We've gotten a lot of great data from today.

And so one of the things, again, safety first that we want to do is monitor, return to baseline. So let's observe the subject. Let's make sure they're able to recover from the different levels of CO2 or any of the symptoms that they might have been experiencing. We can collect more data at that time to determine what is the time to recovery. Is this really leaving, more of a longer lasting impact on on the subject or crew member?

Ultimately, what are the kinds of missions that we could use this kind of equipment with in the future? I definitely think the lunar missions, and you can see by the sand and the rocks that we have here, we're, we're thinking very much about the moon. That's our immediate focus, of this APACHE environment and VR. But we're also starting to think about Mars and Mars is a little bit farther away, but the challenge is even greater. You know, we're going to be very, very far from home.

You are not going to have instantaneous comm with the ground once you burn for Mars, you're not coming back probably for two and a half years. So there's going to be even more testing and more training PersEIDS Or the personal Eva Informatics and decision support system is primarily looking at a martian, Eva operations. And so how does that look like as far as that interaction. So we have first a pre Eva planning step that looks at, what tasks are going to be doing where they're going to have to traverse out to to be able to successfully complete an Eva. And then we look at, the data components for the individual to track those consumables along the planning stage.

And once we have that planned out, that's, the as planned, Eva timeline that we have, an IV crew member then direct the EV crew members through and so we have the intra vehicular crew member and the extra vehicular crew member. So the person doing the spacewalk vs someone who's inside. And so then the EV crew member will put on the, suit simulator, for instance, in VR, and we'll go through, for instance, a martian Eva, being directed for specific geology tasks or maintenance tasks from the IV crew member. So in PersEIDS, within the Apache environment, we end up using a few different modalities of walking around. We call it traversing in Eva.

And so we use one. We use a passive treadmill. So we keep them stationary and we can have them walk along a traverse path. We can really get a lot of good data based on speed and resistance, that we'll track back to performance. So allows us to answer a bunch of questions.

We also use an infina-deck, which is an omnidirectional treadmill, and so that gives the individual more freedom to move around and be able to do geology in the actual space. And so to be able to walk, we have those two different, modalities walking around. We also have transitions into the sandbox where we can actually do simulated geology tasks, in a hybrid reality environment. So we could go from VR to hybrid or also stay in VR and do geology in the sandbox. We're primarily looking for performance measures of heart rate, metabolic rate for heat loading.

We look at core temperature. So we actually have ingestible core temperature pills that we look at. We have skin temperature that helps us map back to a liquid cooling garment. So it's all encompassing so that we can get this performance. And so that's the whole component of of PersEIDS helps that individualized decision support.

If for instance, a crew members overheating or they're, they're, getting slower in their Eva, we can make sure they get back safely by changing their timeline and assisting the automation between the two IV and EV crew members. As we start to research the conditions of future spaceflight, virtual reality is going to play a central role because we really have to mimic these unique conditions. How do you research going to Mars? Well, you know, you have to start mimicking the conditions you expect. For Mars.

We collect data in what are called analog environments, where we will actually build out, physically, that maybe the habitat or different aspects, like a sandbox behind me that we're expecting for future spaceflight and have people do research activities and training in that. But we can't do that for every possible scenario. And it's really hard to do with multiple spaceflight stressors. So virtual reality allows us to be able to mimic both the physical through what the movements they're doing with the VR on, but also the psychological aspects of things like extravehicular activity. You are now actually on Mars doing a spacewalk.

And what's that like? You are now traversing six hours on to the Mars surface through VR. You know, we're not going to be able to mimic that in real life. You know, six hour VR, can actually do that. And so we can push the limits and really mimic what we're expecting for future spaceflight through virtual reality.

And so this is where VR becomes absolutely critical. We haven't put humans in this environment. We've never been to the south pole of the moon. We have not done any lunar exploration in darkness or low sun angle. And so we have, some other VR assets at NASA where we can actually play with the lighting.

And so you can have a computer simulation of what that lunar lighting is going to look like. And you can see how you would do these tasks in the lunar lighting and you can evaluate, hey, is this even feasible? Should we even be trying to do this, at this light angle. And so we're going to do all of that kind of testing and training here. We've got the sandbox and you can vary the lighting conditions incredibly easy in the VR model.

And so we can define the limits of what we're capable of and what the system is capable of. And then within that, we can figure out there's little permutations about how we want to change the mission or our equipment, or our operations in order to accommodate that. But we've got to have that. You can't do that if you just put a bunch of lights in here, you would not replicate that environment. You have to be able to have that computer model.

So that's where VR is going to be incredibly useful. It's also important that the crew have access to and training time and partial gravity facilities in an actual pressurized spacesuit, especially with the commercial spacesuits coming online, it'll be really important that the crew have experience on the actual lunar Martian surface by way of virtual reality, or in an actual pressurized spacesuit at partial gravity. It's really important and paramount that they have access to and training, for all of these different things in order to optimize success for future EVA. Virtual reality has a lot of potential for use here at NASA, particularly with training. So, allowing the crew to experience what it will be like to be on the surface of the moon or the surface of Mars before they get there.

And so we have lots of different ways that we simulate EVAs. They all have their pros and cons. And so virtual reality is a critical part of giving that full picture to the crew members before they go, so that they can experience what it will be like and allow them to kind of understand what it will be like to do an Eva. On the surface.

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