Addressing Information Needs for Human Sensemaking in Evolving Aerospace Environments

Abstract

Both aviation and spaceflight environments are approaching inflection points in the development of new systems capabilities and mission operations profiles affecting human operators in both ground-based and crewmember operations.  Operational hazards such as environmental conditions and other aerospace entities (including non-human vehicles) challenge crewmember sensemaking and distributed expertise for safe operations.  The research presented here examines information presentation and operator sensemaking in both mission planning and real-time mission operations conditions.  In the aviation sector, pilots must content with dynamic weather conditions, the increase in aviation traffic, and the requirements to understand new sources of weather and status information during low altitude operations.  In spaceflight, increasing density of operations and planned entries in low earth orbit through cislunar and lunar surface operations require new presentation of status and uncertainty of situation awareness for other vehicles and space debris.  Our research addresses the development of tools and assessment of pilot sensemaking and situation awareness in these increasingly complex settings.  A variety of desktop, small device, and even virtual reality interface designs are being considered to understand how, what, and when pilots or astronauts can make sense of dynamic information sources, and how these information sources support or distract from decision making and action execution tasks.   System and interface design elements, and performance evaluation studies, are considered with data collection from domain experts, including pilots, astronauts, and mission operations personnel to inform future system development efforts.