Johnson Space Center- Flight Software Development
August 22, 2022-December 2, 2022
Final Goals of your Project/s:
– Continue support for Oneportal on the international Space Station and future Artemis missions (write software in Labview that can interface with pre-made software)
– Create a program that can be used by the ASCR’s to store astronaut workout preferences (bar positions for each workout, sets, and reps).
– Write Pac-man for Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented reality system to be used as a game to play while research is conducted on the subject.
– Write a program that store controller inputs and the timestamp they occurred at, save int a database.
– help construct support systems for a proprietary hardware for a 0g flight.
Describe what you did during the internship:
Throughout my internship I worked on many projects, the main three were: ASCR templates, GVS, and wobbleboard. In the ASCR project, I wrote software in Visual Basic for Microsoft’s excel spreadsheets to allow the ASCR’s to write a prescribed workout for for each astronaut everyday which gets uplinked to the ISS afterwards. The next project I worked on was a project called GVS which stands for galvanic vestibular stimulation. In this project, I wrote pac-man so the user had a game to play while they were condition to a stimulus. Finally, I worked heavily on our wobble-board project, wherein I wrote software to read motor values and write them to a csv for analysis afterwards. I also helped with writing an interface to be able to control the load each motor was experiencing.
Did you achieve your goals? What were the results?:
Yes! All of the goals were achieved. The results of all the projects looked fantastic, the results of the GVS study seem promising and so did the wobbleboard 0g flight. GVS will be an ongoing research project for the branch I was in; towards the end of the internship, I wrote some software that they will use for the next study. Wobbleboard looked amazing and is in talks to maybe be sent to the ISS.
Describe positive lessons learned:
– Importance of education, everyone around was extremely educated and eager to learn more. This atmosphere pushed me to care more about my studies and heavily consider post-graduate schooling.
– Hard work; everything that my branch was doing had tight deadline. Despite this, all of us came into work and started the days duties right away. While talking to my co-workers, all of them mentioned that you don’t need to be incredibly smart to do anything, just be able to work hard at it.
Describe negative lessons learned:
– Planning and coordination is difficult. During my time at NASA I was a part of many early stage projects, some of which came to fruition, but some did not. The main issue was coordinating with management for funding or planning to write proposals for funding, a fair bit of time was spent in meetings discussing planning other meetings.