Project Description
Our current work is supported by a multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation under their SocioComputational Systems (SOCS) division. Under this project, the SpaceTeams Research Group is currently engaged in a multi-year study of the Cassini mission to Saturn: a large-scale international science collaboration underway since the late 1980s and culminating in the launch and operation of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft in the Saturn system.
Our project, entitled, FROM CYBERSPACE TO OUTER SPACE, examines social computing and its effects in large-scale planetary exploration systems. After all, despite its use of “unmanned” probes, planetary exploration as an endeavor relies heavily on human interactions to cultivate ongoing mission success. Fostering international and institutional partnerships alongside the relationships among scientists, engineers, and managers that animate a spacecraft and keep it safe, the human element plays a critical role in the achievement of scientific, technical, and cost-related mission goals. The unique configuration of these interactions, relationships and roles lends each mission a different organizational culture -- what members identify as a mission’s “style” or “personality” -- that affects how the mission proceeds, how goals are met, and how science is done. Indeed, as one of the instrument operators on a NASA mission put it, “Once those [robots] leave Earth, the team is all we’ve got.”
However, the team is not necessarily all they’ve got. The technologies involved in robotic space exploration are not limited to the distant robots: they encompass a wide variety of computational systems. Hardware is networked across distributed worksites; home-grown and commercial software suites control aspects of the spacecraft and coordinate work activity; teleconference lines and email lists buzz with the interactions of the human members of the spacecraft team. It is in this social and computational environment, in which technologies and human relationships mediate each other, that spacecraft teams meet, negotiate, resolve and plan their robot’s activities.
To better address the complex issues regarding the mutual interdependence of the social and the computational, and to present broader implications for the design of complex human-computer systems, we are conducting an intensive ethnographic study of the Cassini mission to Saturn. By probing the practices of sociotechnical organization, distributed operations, data sharing and community maintenance in an existing, complex sociocomputational environment, we hope to better inform the design of increasingly socially intelligent computational systems both inside and outside of planetary exploration.
The intellectual merit of the project is in its melding of three areas of investigation – the history and sociology of science from the STS tradition, the study of virtual organizations from the Computer-Supported Co-operative Work and Organization Sciences traditions, and the study and design of technical artifacts from the Human-Computer and Human-Robot Interaction traditions – to generate a holistic picture of the institutional realities of large-scale technoscience in a radically distributed social-computational context. The project also offers potential critical implications for the effective design of social-computational systems for scientific production.
The broader impacts of this work include design implications for the next generation of social-computational tools, and, in particular, ways of understanding scientific practice alongside the tools through which it is conducted, a truly sociotechnical approach. This is particularly relevant in cases such as space science, which is a critical site which scientific research reaches public consciousness; the very public nature of scientific success and failure associated with NASA projects make the Cassini mission an exemplary case study of contemporary scientific practice.