Investigating Human/System Interfaces and Interactions in a ìLights-Outî Operational Environment

Previous researchers have assumed that an analyst or engineer, who has not been maintaining an active awareness of an automated system’s behavior or context, will be able to respond to a call when his help is needed to address a problem that the system itself cannot handle. As an example, in planning for lights-out spacecraft operations, provision has been made for notifying an appropriate human operator or analyst to respond to a spacecraft anomaly that cannot be handled directly by the lights-out ground system. Although it is recognized that notifications will occur infrequently, little provision has been made to compensate for the normal human forgetting that is likely to occur between human involvement with the system. Studies being conducted at the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center are investigating ways to address this issue and bring the human expert back "into the loop" as quickly and effectively as possible.