The Earth Independent Operations (EIO) domain is developing technologies, data sets, and procedures that will allow a small crew to discover and resolve critically urgent anomalies with limited abort options and no real time ground support. These added risks exist due to how far Mars is from Earth and the fact that data cannot be transmitted faster than the speed of light. Finding solutions will involve advancement in crew interaction design, automated anomaly detection, automated procedure development, communications enhancements as well as many other core technology improvements.  

Analysis to date has shown that the best path forward on this challenge is combining improvements to current approaches in data utilization with development of advanced technologies utilizing multiple disciplines. The goal is to give astronauts more data and improved organization of information, allowing them to quickly ramp up knowledge on a particular issue to make decisions on resolution. Each of the teams in EIO require accurate, timely and well-organized data to prove out the approaches and eventually execute the mission to Mars.  

The EIO Data Integration (DI) Project focuses on how data is acquired, stored, related, and delivered. This involves understanding the processes used throughout the lifecycle of the hardware. The research in optimizing data integration is focused on its source and usage leveraging the engineering processes that utilize the data to drive the approach. 

The primary benefits of the Data Integration team are to work with each of the other EIO teams to gather, organize, store, and deliver integrated data sets that support their research objectives. For example, work has started in developing a system to pull data out of the International Space Station telemetry data set and allow researchers in the Anomaly Response team to automatically format that data into artificial intelligence training data sets for use in anomaly detection models. That data will be combined by data integration with supporting information about the water purification systems to allow more accurate anomaly detection models to be researched and tested.  

In anticipation of increased telemetry and engineering data needs, the DI team is prototyping technologies that will help in more efficiently marking anomalies within telemetry data and standing up additional data systems to aid in shared, reliable access by Mars Campaign Office teams. Moving forward. Data Integration will extend the supporting data that is available to the teams to add in things like procedure data, testbed telemetry data and hardware definition data. 

Over the long term, the knowledge gained on what data was needed and how it was used will be leveraged to define the requirements for data delivery across the Mars vehicle architecture, allowing the technologies developed to scaled for a Mars mission. As an example, defining the unique requirements for onboard telemetry data storage, transmission and cross system Interfaces will likely be within scope.