Welcome!
Welcome to the website of the SPACETEAMS Project at Princeton University!
We are an interdisciplinary research group based in the social and computer sciences engaged in a multi-year study of robotic space exploration teams. We bring together sociology, human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, and history of science and technology to describe and design for multi-disciplinary robotic collaborations.
Funded by the National Science Foundation and based at Princeton University and at the University of California, Irvine, our studies of such missions as the NASA Mars Exploration Rovers and the NASA-ESA-ASI Cassini Mission to Saturn aim to change the way we think about complex sociotechnical teams of collaborating scientists and engineers.
Why Study Spacecraft Teams?
Robotic space exploration is a domain that brings together scientists and engineers in dynamic, time-sensitive, and networked activity to animate a technological system on another planet. Members of the team are usually distributed across multiple planets, relying daily upon sophisticated technologies to co-ordinate their activities. They involve committed teams of researchers who must work together across national, institutional, and even disciplinary boundaries. Lessons learned from studying these technoscientific collaborations in their everyday activities has implications for how we establish successful technical and scientific collaborations in domains across the board.
The Spaceteams project is supported by The National Science Foundation under SOCS Grant #0968616. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation
Header Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute