As the IT group was working throughout the whole weekend to get communication and telemetric infrastructure working at Rio Tinto’s MCC (Mission Control Center) at Innsbruck a first RSS (Remote Science Support) test run was conducted this Sunday. Rio Tinto moved for this Sunday to Innsbruck, just two offices next to the Flight Control Room to get an idea on how telemetric and communication channels work and moreover to check the data stream to remote scientists, who were sitting this Sunday in Budapest, Graz & France.

After some technical difficulties the IT group was able to establish voice communication to all connected participants and for the first time the FD (Flight Director) could give a “Go for EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity)” command! Unfortunately the communication was disturbed by feedback noise and the GO had to be cancelled, which was an interesting test as this could happen during the mission as well. Feedback noise was eliminated and after polling of all involved functions, the EVA dry run test could then start. It was very interesting on how Capcom, BME (Biomedical Engineer), remote scientists, FD (Flight Director), the Flight plan crew and local scientists worked together, especially as a blue hammer was found on the test site which gathered the interest of one remote scientist. Bringing all interests of the different people involved under the hood of a interruption free mission run and seeing the way decisions were made under the pressure of time and data bandwidth gave us lots of lessons learned impressions which will surely make the mission then much more frictionless and smooth! After a feedback session the decisions of undergoing more dry runs like this was clear and a day to conduct this was found quite quickly.

IT group while testing

Flight Control Room - Projection of Data

Capcom (li), BME (re), dahinter FD & Flightplan

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