Simulation and Imagined Similarities: Worksite Analogs for Space Science and Exploration

• In Event: Seeing through New Eyes: Science, Truth and Technologies of Visualization - I

Abstract

Planetary analogs are sites on Earth selected for environmental (e.g., geo-bio-chem features, terrain and composition, gravity) similarity with remote sites such as Earth’s Moon and Mars. Analogs are found world-wide, typically in “extreme environments” of scientific interest both for what they yield about Earth and other planetary systems such as the Moon or Mars, two remote sites that have become accessible worksites in the 20th century. Within these analogs, simulations of worksites are used for development and testing of infrastructure, technologies and communication practices (known in short as mission operations) for future space exploration missions. This configuration produces an environment in which there are two simulated realities in which people work to produce knowledge about the “true” site, the extra-terrestrial site it simulates, and mission operations. To elucidate this multiplicity of realities, the authors ask what it means to construct and embody a facsimile of a worksite within a planetary analog. Using an interdisciplinary approach, they will draw from social studies of work, science and technology that have interrogated the concepts of space, place, and laboratories, from cognitive science on envisioned worlds, and from experience as participants in the construction of analog sites in the 21st century. Discourse analysis on analog research published in an international journal for scientific space exploration will also be a feature of this examination.

Authors

• Zara Mirmalek, Harvard University

• Matthew J Miller, Jacobs, NASA Johnson Space Center

• Darlene S. S. Lim, BAER Institute, NASA Ames Research Center