The PROMISE mission will take place in the LMCP training centre consisting of the Hydronaut H03 Deep Lab, the Mission Control Centre and the Extravehicular Activity Simulation Area (EVA Area). The Hydronaut project is what the aforementioned FEL teams have a close collaboration with. The programme of the simulated mission will have a scientific and popularization part.
During the scientific part of the mission, the crew, consisting of Aleš Svoboda, designer Matyáš Šanda and hyperbaric medicine expert Dr. Miroslav Rozložník, will spend 48 hours in isolation in the Hydronaut habitat. The simulation of the flight to the Moon will include various scientific experiments and an isolated ascent to the "lunar surface" with the help of virtual reality, where the crew will "collect" geological samples.
In the popularization part, consisting of interviews and presentations of participating institutions and companies, Dr. Zbyněk Kocur from the Department of Telecommunication Technology will speak on behalf of FEL on Sunday, 8 September at 15:30. The popularization part will be broadcast on social media.
It was Dr. Kocur's team that provided the Hydronaut project with its E-Shaper device and modified it to influence the communication channel between the crew and the "ground" control station. "Thanks to the E-Shaper device, we are able to create a scenario in which we will gradually increase the delay and change the reliability of the communication over a period of hours and days, thus emulating (mimicking) the conditions during a trip to the Moon or another space mission. The project participants will test that the systems in use work under these conditions, but they will also test delayed or distorted communication between the people in the habitat and the control centre," described Dr Kocur. "Modifications to our facility were necessary in two ways. First, the delay values themselves had to be increased from values common on Earth, which are at most hundreds of milliseconds, to the order of seconds to tens of seconds. For more distant missions, however, it can be minutes or more. Furthermore, it was important to be able to specify a dynamic scenario, according to which the delay varies, corresponding to the trajectory of the mission," explained doc. Jiří Vodrážka, Head of the Department of Telecommunication Engineering at FEL.r. Kocur podotkl, že „ladění“ E-Shaperu, zařízení původně určeného na emulaci standardních komunikačních sítí, stále pokračuje. „Náš diplomant Filip Cendelín právě pracuje na integračních scénářích přesně situovaných do oblasti vesmírných misí,” vysvětlil. „Máme základní skupiny scénářů, které jsou pro let na Měsíc a zpět. Filip Cendelín vyvíjí ještě speciální rozšíření pro to, aby správně fungoval přenos hlasu a signalizace pro interakci s posádkou,“ doplnil expert.
Dr. Kocur noted that "fine tuning" of the E-Shaper, a device originally designed to emulate standard communications networks, is still ongoing. "Our graduate student Filip Cendelin is currently working on integration scenarios precisely situated in the field of space missions," he explained. "We have a core group of scenarios that are for going to the moon and back. Filip Cendelín is still developing special extensions to make the voice transmission and signalling work properly for interaction with the crew," the expert added.
E-Shaper is one of the parts of the universal F-LAB system for testing communication networks and IT solutions developed at the CTU FEL. "At the beginning of the development of the whole system was a data communication tester called F-Tester, with which we achieved several commercial successes. Its version for measuring various mobile networks on the move (so-called drive tests) is used by the Czech Telecommunications Office to verify the coverage and data throughput of operators in the Czech Republic. For this solution, the development team also received the Rector's Award for the application of the results of scientific, research, innovation and creative work," recalled doc. Vodrážka.
How to work better with the control system?
During this summer, experts from the Department of Computer Graphics and Interaction at FEL have also joined the project in cooperation with Hydronaut. The team, led by doc. Professor Zdeněk Míkovec, will work on improving the Common Tongue on-board system, which is used for logistics operations in industrial practice and simulation of space missions. "This can be both tasks and resources - human, but also technical or material, for example, managing and controlling material consumption during experiments," said doc. Míkovec.
According to doc. Míkovec, the preparation of information and data visualization is an interesting challenge for the crew, which is constantly under psychological pressure. Other needs of the project include the efficient transfer of work between different actors, the continuous execution of tasks, and also changes to original plans. "They need to be able to change the plan quickly, while still maintaining maximum efficiency in the whole process," the expert pointed out. "And it is this system that we are now tasked with optimising and improving, in addition to designing new ways of visualisation and interaction," he stated, adding that two main principles apply - to make everything as reliable and secure as possible. "This means reducing as much as possible the amount of errors that could occur during interaction - oversights, misunderstanding commands. At the same time, everything needs to be as efficient as possible. Because these are relatively expensive missions. Any inefficiency will dramatically affect the cost or even failure to meet the set goal," the scientist said.
According to doc. Míkovec, the team is expecting about a year of cooperation. "The first results will be available this autumn, when we will analyse the function of the entire system. At the moment, one of the students, Adam Loucký, is already 'on a mission' with the system and researching it. We will also start with user research among all the players involved. And during the winter semester we will create a first proposal of what the improved system could look like," plans doc. Míkovec. According to him, the summer semester will be in the spirit of intensive testing and prototyping of the new Common Tongue system interface - in laboratory conditions and in the missions themselves. "And gradually we will fine-tune everything so that we can easily incorporate the results into the existing system," doc. Míkovec.