If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.

“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

On Episode 173, NASA SUITS activity manager Brandon Hargis and technical lead Paromita Mitra talk about the opportunity for students and teachers to design and create spacesuit information displays in augmented reality environments. This episode was recorded on October 28, 2020.

Transcript

Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 173, “Students in Spacesuits.” I’m Gary Jordan, and I’ll be your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight. This one is for the students and teachers out there that want to get involved with NASA, and even getting some experience with NASA before you hit college. NASA has some exciting ways to get involved in America’s space agency and get real hands-on experience. An initiative called NASA SUITS [Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students] is doing just that. And there are some incredible challenges to get involved with where students can contribute to actual NASA missions. On this episode, we’re bringing in Brandon Hargis, who is an Education Specialist and the NASA SUITS Activity Manager. And Paromita Mitra who is a human interface engineer and the NASA SUITS Technical Lead. They’re both here at the Johnson Space Center. We talk about some of the more recent challenges and how you can stay tuned for some upcoming opportunities. Let’s get right into it. Enjoy.

[ Music]

Host: Brandon and Paromita. Thanks, so much for coming on Houston We Have A Podcast today.

Brandon Hargis: Thanks for having us.

Paromita Mitra: Yeah, thanks for having us. Excited to be here.

Host: This is a really cool program. We have, NASA SUITS. I’m excited to dive into it and sort of get a background really, on what this program is and how you’re contributing to the overall, I guess, spacesuit community. Really cool stuff. But I like how we have you both here because Brandon, you’re on the education side. Paromita, you’re on the engineering side. I’m curious to hear about your backgrounds and how this whole thing came together, how education and engineering came into this one project here. So, Brandon, why don’t we start with you? Tell us about yourself and what you do for NASA.

Brandon Hargis: So, I’m a NASA education specialist in the Office of STEM Engagement at Johnson Space Center. I manage the NASA SUITS challenge for students. And it is a nationwide challenge that involves undergraduate and graduate students from institutions all over the United States and Territories. I have a bachelor’s degree in middle grades education, a master’s degree in education, administration and leadership. I’m also currently pursuing a PhD in education, learning design and technology at Oklahoma State University, which I’m looking forward to completing in December of ’22. And I came to NASA in 2009. I started at Langley Research Center in Virginia. And I’ve been at Johnson Space Center since 2015. I started out doing professional development workshops for educators and student programs and public engagement activities. And the last three, going on four years, I’ve been an IPA and that’s Intergovernmental Personnel Agreement. And basically, that just allows me to manage activities like NASA SUITS as an employee here at Johnson Space Center. So, I’m really excited about the activities that we’re going to talk about today that NASA SUITS is doing this year.

Host: Very cool, Brandon. And I love your whole background on education. You’ve really dedicated a lot of your academic life to learning about educating students and teaching them new things. I’m curious to hear your perspective on what you’re passionate about in terms of teaching them specifically about from the NASA perspective, about STEM, Science, Technology, Engineering, Math and then even human spaceflight, some of the ways that those two passions combine for you.

Brandon Hargis: Yeah, what really started me on this journey was I was teaching early on in 1999 and early 2000s in middle grades science classrooms. I got involved with NASA professional development and realizing that I could engage my students with NASA missions and NASA content in learning the subjects within the science classroom at a much higher rate of engagement. And the students were excited about it, excited about learning. And so, then when I came to NASA and was basically sharing this work with educators across the country and inspiring them to also consider using NASA content and missions in their lesson planning and unit planning. And now with the SUITS activity being so focused on how we can have students contribute to technical solutions for NASA missions like Artemis, and going to the Moon, starting in 2024, the idea is to one, increase their 21st century skills, creativity, communication, collaboration, and communication. I think already said communication. But we really want to increase those skills and give them authentic experiences with technical problems. So, this problem solving, which is another 21st century skill, and also integrating the knowledge that they’re gaining from the courses they’re taking at institutions in computer science, but also human factors courses. We’ve had students involved that are in kinesiology or involved that were in more of a psychology background or marketing and so forth, and graphics. And having all of these diverse backgrounds coming together to offer a solution that is very diverse in nature, but also provide some concepts that can help our technical community as they’re looking to the future of what they want the SUITS capabilities to be. And so, all of that combined I think provides a very rich experience for the students. It also gives them material to produce new research and development in a field that is relatively new if we consider augmented reality, head mounted displays only having been out for a few — you know, just a handful of years. Even though augmented reality may go back a couple of decades or so. The work that they’re doing is on the cutting edge. It’s pushing the research and development in that field not only to benefit our technical community at NASA and the work that we’re doing, but also the STEM community at large. The higher education academic institutions at large, they’re creating new courses, they’re revising courses as a result of SUITS content. So, we’re just very excited about these opportunities that the students are having and being afforded as a result.

Host: I’m definitely looking forward to hearing more about the SUITS challenge because the augmented reality stuff I think, is just so high tech, and I’m trying to imagine myself as a student, just being like, “What? I get to do that?” So that’s going to be really cool to get into. But I think your discussion on diverse background, I think that is a perfect way to lead into Paromita. Paromita, you’re on the technical side. Brandon just talked about his education background. You’re an engineer. Tell us about yourself and your work with NASA.

Paromita Mitra: Yeah, so I have a background in aerospace engineering in undergrad and grad school. Specifically, my role at Johnson, I am in the avionics systems division, which is an engineering directorate. And so, within avionics, it’s a lot of electrical engineers. But also, specifically, I’m in the human interface branch. So, my primary title, I’m a human interface engineer, but I’m also a Principal Investigator. The main project that I contribute to is the xEMU. So, as a lot of you may know, the xEMU [Exploration ExtraVehicular Mobility Unit] is the next generation suit that’s going to the Moon. And my primary job on that suit is as the displays and controls component owner. And so, primarily I developed the display for xEMU for future lunar missions. And within that display, I proposed a project called Joint Augmented Reality Visual Informatics System. And so, I proposed that to NASA Headquarters, a funding line called early career initiative. And we were actually awarded it for 2020 and 2021, which is super exciting. But in a nutshell, we’re developing all of the displays and controls requirements on xEMU. And so, that’s my primary job, is being the PI for that project while also being the component owner for xEMU. So, they’re pretty much, they go hand in hand. In a nutshell, that’s what I do. So, I guess in summary, my role on SUITS would be as a SUITS technical lead. So as one of my many other tasks, leading the displays and controls work, working with Brandon. I’m very lucky to have someone with an education that is as knowledgeable as Brandon. But also from a technical standpoint, I help to guide a lot of the mission descriptions and statements for each year, which make the students — which help the students develop technology for augmented reality, develop software for augmented reality that is most applicable to what xEMU needs, and what the EVA community at Johnson is really looking for. So, as a technical lead for SUITS and in that role, I really help guide a lot of the mission statements for SUITS and really set up the EVA scenario for what we’re looking to develop.

Host: See, I think what’s cool about this topic, Paromita, is as you were going into depth on just the technical knowledge that you have and your expertise on some of the work for the xEMU. But what’s unique about this topic is we’re talking about this complicated idea of doing some sort of, I guess, the human interface sort of engineering here. And you’re talking about bringing in students and having younger people contribute to the project. What do you think is the benefit here from your perspective as the engineer to involve students in coming up with some of these concepts and ideas?

Paromita Mitra: Absolutely, that’s a great question. When I entered my master’s program in aerospace engineering, I was given a problem statement. I reached out to some engineers at Johnson and I was working on a project in collaboration with engineers at Johnson and engineers on xEMU to really prove out human performance and feasibility of a possible heads up display, or a head mounted display on an older suit called the Mark III. And so, when I was entering that field of augmented reality, looking at unique displays and visual agents for the EVA workflow, I realized that it’s a really small field. And there was not — I think, I found like one or two papers that I could reference in the field altogether, that, you know, had — they were measuring human metrics in an EVA world while using augmented reality as an aide. And to me, being early in this field, I really was wishing that there were other universities, other programs, other professors that were trying to find solutions to these problems. And within human spaceflight in general, I think something that Brandon mentioned earlier about this cross disciplinary field and having students from various backgrounds. I think in human spaceflight in general, and specifically on the spacesuit, we are engineering a system that is very close to the human. It is a one-person spacecraft. And so that requires — that in itself requires us to be very cross disciplinary in how we approach problems. We need to have a medical understanding, to some extent. We need to have an understanding of design, of mechanical engineering, thermal systems, electrical engineering. It’s kind of an all-encompassing problem statement within xEMU. And so, for me, I think what SUITS is really providing is, every year we turn on a new problem statement. And it gives academia this entire problem space to explore and develop. And SUITS provides the Subject Matter Experts from JSC, from NASA who are directly evaluating their designs. And we’re having this back and forth with academia and expanding the research and development for visual displays, for the purposes of EVA. And looking at human performance and looking at all of these cross disciplinary fields. And so, that’s I think the biggest value and why I love working with SUITS in general.

Host: Yeah, broaden the — not just keep it to just spacesuits in general. But just broaden the interest and awareness of this concept and maybe get some more research just all across the board that could be implemented for not just spacesuits but for other things. I absolutely love it. With that, I want to go into SUITS itself. You know, what is this this program? Of course, it’s an acronym that stands for Spacesuit User Interface Technologies for Students. Brandon at a high level, what is NASA SUITS?

Brandon Hargis: So, NASA SUITS, again, to kind of put this into perspective at a high level is a mission-driven challenge for students to design and create spacesuit information displays in augmented reality environments. So, we ask them to create the software user interface. And we give them some tools in a virtual community. We ask them to use off the shelf hardware to display the software that they end up creating from that. And it’s really meant to provide solutions for the technical community, which in this case, Paromita is the interface for those solutions that come in. And so, we want to produce these solutions that the technical community can use with the student work.

Host: So, that is a nice description of essentially what — you know, what it is that you’re doing. But to kind of get some background on just, you know, what it’s like, I guess, to participate in SUITS. Brandon, some of the things that you’ve gone through in the past because this is not the first year that you’ve done SUITS. This is not a new thing. You’ve got a couple years under your belt.

Brandon Hargis: Yeah, so in the first year this kind of started as a meeting between the EVA manager and our director in the Office of External Relations. There was a conversation that took place about the need for future forward development that wasn’t necessarily ready to be worked by the technical community at NASA. And our external relations director, who is now the Associate Administrator for the Office of STEM Engagement at NASA, Mr. Mike Kincaid, suggested that why don’t we have students help out with this? And students can do the work to create these concepts. It’s going to benefit them as they’re looking to develop their careers, but it’s also going to benefit the NASA technical community because you start to get some concepts for what future work could do and what it could look like. And also, to understand what some of the pitfalls might be, and what to avoid. And so, this conversation began, and I came on board at that time, ready to head up an activity and was told, “Hey, check this out. See if there’s something you can develop with this. We think it would be very successful collaboration and partnership between the EVA community and the Office of STEM Engagement.” At the time, Office of Education. And so, we had our first challenge using a task board that was designed to mimic an astronaut’s tasks at a fixed location during an EVA or a spacewalk for International Space Station. And that analog was successful for a first-year pilot. So, the second year, we moved on to an actual EVA task that involved a mockup at our space vehicle mockup facility at Johnson Space Center. And the students designed their software interfaces to be able to repair the bearing ring — bearing ring roll module, the BMRRM — Bearing Motor Ring Roll Module. There we go. And we then had them work with a design evaluator when they came on site for the onsite testing, to train that design evaluator to use their software designs and complete the tasks. It worked out very well. We had some great feedback from those evaluators to the teams. And as I said, last year we moved more toward a focus on Artemis missions, where we had students developing solutions for planetary EVAs for the Moon. And so, it’s been a very successful challenge so far in the last three years, again, tying the technical community, their problems identified by the technical community and solutions then developed by the students.

Host: So, you know, we’re talking about solutions here for a spacesuit. And I think it kind of begs the question of, OK, so solutions and I’m thinking, what are the challenges here? And I think what’s unique about this is some of these — the one that we’re in now, at least the challenge now and Paromita, correct me if I’m wrong here, is we’re talking about solving challenges for an astronaut that is walking on the Moon, is that right?

Paromita Mitra: Correct.

Host: So, take us through some of the challenges. OK. You have a spacesuit on. What are the challenges that are presented by wearing a spacesuit? Some of the considerations just in general. And then the considerations of the Moon itself? What you know, now the challenges of walking on another celestial body.

Paromita Mitra: Absolutely. So, I think one of the interesting fun facts about NASA is that we have the EMU spacesuit. And I think it’s a fun fact to say that it’s one of NASA’s currently oldest spacecraft that we’ve been flying continuously. But it’s a spacecraft for one person. The EMU, the older spacesuit that that’s the microgravity suit, is entirely gas pressurized. So, you’re working against this gas pressurized volume. So physically, you’re being loaded by this gas pressurized volume, and you’re working against that. And so that becomes physically cumbersome. An EVA in itself is technically — excuse me, typically like eight hours or so. And so, you’re physically working in that gas pressurized environment, doing dexterity tasks, with some bulkier gloves that have to be gas pressurized, and it’s a little bit difficult to articulate your fingers as well. Cumbersome I think would be the better word. And so physically, it’s a little bit tasking. You’re also — let’s think about, let’s think back to the AMS repairs, our Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, those EVAs that happened. I think it was like a series of four of them or so. That was one of the most complex engineering systems that an astronaut has ever had to fix. And so, you’re also cognitively loaded. So, you are being tasked cognitively by having to do complex engineering tasks, what have you. And so, with the EMU and in that sense, you’re physically and cognitively loaded. Now, with the xEMU we do have — there’s a lot of improvements that have been made to the EMU suit. Primarily because this is a surface suit, we really want the bearings and the hip and shoulder movements to be a lot more seamless. There’s a hard-upper torso in the xEMU. So, mobility in the xEMU is a little bit easier than traditionally the gas pressurized Apollo suits and EMU suits. So, with the xEMU in general, mobility is going to be improved immensely. But it will still — you’ll still be working against that gas pressurized environment. So physically and cognitively crew members are quite tasked during an EVA. Now on the Moon itself, we’re going to this completely new environment. Today on Earth, we typically have landmarks which tell us which — like you can say, “Hey, turn left at that McDonald’s and you’ll get to Regions Bank or whatever.” But on the Moon, we don’t have landmarks like that. So, navigating and knowing how far away you are from objects or knowing how deep a crater is — there’s a lot of uncertainty there. So, on top of the physical and cognitive loading, your environment in itself is quite uncertain because you don’t have landmarks, or this is an unpopulated area. You’re going to a completely new region. And your primary task is to explore and be really efficient in navigating the space. If you go through — if you look at a geologist, what their primary goal is while they’re doing a field study is to understand the geography of that region very well. And so, when we’re going to explore a new terrain like the south pole of the Moon as we are in Artemis, these challenges can be mitigated in a lot of different ways. And we believe on xEMU that the displays and control system would be one of the ways to mitigate some of those challenges. Today, the astronaut gets — I shadowed an EVA recently and there was pretty much almost like a game of telephone with MCC [Mission Control Center] and the crew. So, astronauts currently get direction over audio. And so, if you ever talk to your parents over the phone and tried to get them to reset the Wi-Fi router, it’s pretty difficult. So, to develop the displays and controls system, it would really help to visually aid the crew member. And that would really help with some of the cognitive load that I was mentioning earlier. While also, for this year’s SUITS challenge, we’re really focusing on a big navigation element, because that’s probably one of our biggest questions from a displays and controls perspective, something that we’re not currently able to attain. And so, that’s in a nutshell I guess, what we see are some of the big challenges.

Host: Now, you know, I’m pretending I’m an astronaut now and I’m in the spacesuit. And I’m imagining like “Iron Man” from the movie, right? Just all these like digital things are coming up on my face.

Paromita Mitra: Right.

Host: So, if all these things are coming up in my face, and you’re talking about, you know, like step by step directions on how to reset the Wi-Fi router. What exactly is it that you think would be beneficial from an astronaut’s perspective to have in their face? I see navigation, yes. But what exactly about navigation and then what exactly about the suit? What would be some of those things that you would want to consider to have in front of your face?

Paromita Mitra: So, there is a concept of operations at the EVA office level. And that really drives a lot of what the suit does. It drives a lot of what the displays and controls ultimately does. The displays and controls, however, are a solution for future lunar missions. And it’s probably where a lot of that uncertainty is. And we’re trying to understand and explore what those feature sets are going to be. Today, in the Joint Augmented Reality Visual Informatics System project, for the displays and control project that I lead, the primary objectives of this display is to have procedures — to be able to show procedures to the crew, and MCC controls those procedures. The other is to have a camera functionality. So, there’s a crew camera on the suit. And one of the difficult things about that is that they don’t have a viewfinder to be able to point that camera. They don’t have any situational awareness of what that camera is doing. If they wanted to use that camera to guide mission control, they wouldn’t know what their camera’s actually seeing. So, the display in itself could act as a viewfinder for that camera, amongst other geology tasks, like taking pictures of rock formations or what have you. And then the third thing is understanding the suit system state or suit telemetry. And similarly, for the SUITS design challenge, we asked the students to execute procedures, execute suit telemetry. And then this other piece that we really want to explore and have academia pursue is navigation. And that’s why navigation is a really big focus this year for the challenge.

Host: So, I’m trying to go back to the to the Wi-Fi example, Paromita. I love this one.

Paromita Mitra: Yeah.

Host: So, all the things that you would want, or just at least some of the considerations, right? You said you’re still trying to figure it out. But for the Wi-Fi example, right, you’re talking to your parents, and I’m thinking you’re doing it like over like a video call, right? So, the procedures that you’re talking about would be step by step instructions on, “OK, first, you got to, you know, unplug it, then plug it back in. Or press a button, whatever.” So that would all be part of the display, is the step by step instructions. Those are your procedures. Then the visual system, right, that camera. I love that idea, that they don’t really have an idea of where that camera is pointing. But if you are showing them something on your phone, you have instant feedback, because you’re seeing the view from the camera itself that visual system.

Paromita Mitra: Exactly.

Host: And all of these components would be something that’s put into a spacesuit, right? These are all things that help you to tell your parents how to reset the Wi-Fi router, but we kind of take them for granted. Now imagine that in a spacesuit. That’s kind of what where my brain is going here.

Paromita Mitra: Exactly.

Host: Yeah.

Paromita Mitra: That, that hits it on the dot.

Host: This is how I have to think, Paromita. I’m not the engineering type. But I have helped some folks with some Wi-Fi routers. Brandon, the SUITS challenge in general, tell me about the challenge that we have right now. You know, Paromita already hinted towards this idea of navigation. What are the students that are participating in SUITS right now, what are they doing?

Brandon Hargis: So right now, we actually just finished receiving proposals from teams. And so, we’re in the process of reviewing those proposals, but we expect the students are currently in planning to attack the tasks that we put forward to them. Which do include the navigation tasks that Paromita mentioned in getting from point A to point B, getting back to the lander from some location away from the lander, identifying geological points of interest. But also, they’re preparing for communicating with other devices outside the suit. So, system state tests like the lander suit port interaction, where they would ingress/egress from the airlock. They’re going to be able to manipulate some switches that will allow them to know what their suit consumable status is, as well as interact with another direct control unit device that will allow them to see changes through their software that they’re developing in suit consumables. We also asked them to tackle the science sampling task as a part of this challenge, where they may have a system that’s able to interact with science tools. Maybe it’s tool recognition. We leave this fairly open for them. We give them some broad general goals. But we try not to be too prescriptive in what we’re asking them to do, because we want them to be very open and creative. This is also a very collaborative challenge. And so, we encourage them to collaborate with the other teams, to garner ideas from each other. And also, to work with Subject Matter Experts at NASA to help guide their creativity and innovation. We will be assigning mentors, NASA mentors, to the teams that will have some contact with them throughout the coming months after the selection process is complete. And we hope that that gives the students some NASA perspective as they design toward their solutions that they’ll present later this year in April. So right now, I hope that they are planning, they’re putting together their schedule of work with milestones, which is very important for this challenge. There’s a lot of planning involved in meeting milestones and meeting those deadlines that allow a successful project to come together ahead of their software design review that they will have coming up in March. And at that point, they need to be ready to present the work that they’re doing. And so, planning right now is essential to success for these teams.

Host: So, Brandon, we’re getting a little bit of a snapshot here on the expectations of the students. Sounds like there’s a lot of planning on the forward end. And then there’s a presentation on the back end. So, what are the expectations through the whole duration of this program? You know, what’s happening in this timeframe from the time that they apply, and they submit their proposals to the time that they’re presenting? What are the students participating in?

Brandon Hargis: Yeah, we typically open our recruiting and open our proposal process in late August. We ask student teams to submit a letter of intent to us. It’s not exclusive. It does not exclude teams from giving us a proposal. But it does give us an idea of how many teams are interested in the challenge and lets us know if we should ramp up our promotion to reach more teams. But then in October, usually mid to late October, we have our proposals due. And so, students can attend two to three virtual sessions, information sessions that we will host. We broadcast those out for anyone to attend. And we typically will have Paromita or someone from the technical team represented to give more answers to the technical questions that they may have. So, we help prepare them along the way for what they’re creating. We select our teams in late November to early December. This year, our selection is taking place for a live selection show, which will be hosted on November the 17th and recorded, so it’ll be available on YouTube, the NASA STEM YouTube channel afterward. And then from really that point on, they are designing, they’re creating, putting together this solution that they’re going to configure within their augmented reality headset. This year we have a virtual challenge. And so, students will not be traveling to Houston in April, but they will ship their devices after completing the software design review in March. Those devices will be shipped to JSC for us to test here on site in a scenario that we’ve developed to help them meet all of these tasks that we’ve asked them to complete. And so that software design review is very important because it helps us understand more about the work students have put into their design, how it works, and whether it’s ready to be tested when it arrives here. So that’s really kind of the rundown up through the test week. After our test week, students are asked to submit a draft of a white paper that they will attempt to have published in a technical journal or at a technical conference, that we asked them to work with their faculty advisor in creating this publication. It provides them with practice in writing research papers, but also an opportunity to get published and to present their work to the wider technical community. That is typically due within a month after the test week. And then they have the remaining time after that to seek publication and update us on the success of their publications. We then begin our planning processes for the following year, for the next cycle. And we start all over again, the next August.

Host: See, if I’m a student here, I mean, that sounds — the expectations here are so high. I’m thinking if I’m a student, like, wow, that’s certainly a lot of work. But then at the same time, it’s all work that pays off. And, you know, you’re talking about publication, you’re talking about spreading your ideas to a much larger community. And I think that’s something a lot of people can get behind and be passionate about. Paromita, I know in the beginning, you mentioned when you were a student, you know, you tried looking for some of these concepts because you were interested in them, and you had some trouble finding, you know, all these papers. You know, so it sounds like this is a way for more papers to be submitted. But at the same time, you know, if I’m a student and I want to learn about this and participate in this challenge, where would you point students to go ahead and start learning now, so they can participate in SUITS maybe later on?

Paromita Mitra: Absolutely. So, the field of humans and aerospace, as a lot of people call it, or human systems integration, is really approachable by a lot of different — I guess engineering disciplines or educational disciplines. But for the SUITS design challenge specifically, it is a software design challenge. And if you’re building on software for a specific augmented reality headset — many of the popular ones are the Microsoft HoloLens and the Magic Leap headset. Primarily students will develop their software in a game engine. So, when you’re developing augmented reality software, you’re working in a game engine and that game engine is called Unity. And so honestly, YouTube has plenty of tutorials for learning on how to develop in Unity. It’s pretty straightforward. For the Microsoft HoloLens, Microsoft has a suite of helpful resources. They have tutorials online. You can just Google how to develop apps for the Microsoft HoloLens. And you’ll just come across a huge user community. We also have some Slack channels that we’ve pointed the students towards that are just developer communities for the software design aspect of it. And there’s also this other aspect of SUITS where we do human in the loop testing. And we really have to be thoughtful about human centered design. And for that, human factors courses in the field of humans in aerospace is rather new, I would say. Probably in the mid to late ’90s is really when things started gearing up. As you might know, there’s also a human systems integration employee resource group here at JSC to ensure that we are focusing on human centered design. But that field of study, there are universities and programs and graduate programs that offer classes in human factors. I took a lot of my classes in graduate school, were in a computer science department for human/computer interaction, human/robot interaction, fascinating fields of study. And so, I would suggest looking to those classes and taking those classes. One of the pieces of SUITS is asking the students to develop human in the loop studies to validate their designs. And so, how do you set up a human study? What are the factors and objectives of this study that I’m trying to measure? And being really thoughtful about your population size and the people that you’re measuring. So, a lot of that is available. I would suggest taking those classes and really digging into the literature of human factors and human systems engineering. So, those are probably the two primary tenants of SUITS as a whole.

Host: See, Paromita — oh, go ahead, Brandon.

Brandon Hargis: The other thing I would add to that is just to say that for the challenge itself, I would also direct students to go to stem.nasa.gov/artemis, where they can find SUITS as well as the other Artemis student challenges. And we keep that information up to date throughout the year as we move toward the next round of challenges. And so, we put a lot of the resources and things that they’re going to need for writing a proposal as well as reading about the current challenge on there. Also, Paromita brought up Microsoft and a lot of the things on HoloLens that students can read about and can view. We do have a Space Act agreement with Microsoft, that was developed as an annex for SUITS, for our challenge in particular that helps connect the HoloLens division with our technical community, but also provides, you know, opportunities to collaborate with them and work with them in making SUITS an even more enriching challenge. But that doesn’t mean that we only ask students to use a HoloLens. It’s open for them to select any augmented reality platforms, head mounted displays, peripherals that they choose to use. We’ve had teams with Magic Leap. We’ve had teams using Haptic Glove from another company that was integrated. And so, it’s very much open. And there’s lots of resources out there. And we’re always looking for ways that we can include those resources in our virtual course that we enroll the students in as a start in December usually every year. So, just lots of great things for them to learn more and be prepared.

Host: I love that. You know, if you’re kind of overwhelmed by saying, “Man, this is so cool. How do I get involved?” that there is just a plethora of resources for you to explore? Brandon, anything else that you’d like our audience to know, for those who might be curious and want to participate in SUITS? Something to look out for, some date to put on their calendar, some skill that you think would be valuable to participate with NASA, something that you’d like our audience to know?

Brandon Hargis: One of the things I would point out too is that over the past three years, and now working on our fourth year, is we’ve worked with over 50 different institutions across the United States this year, from Puerto Rico all the way out to the west coast in California, and north, south. So, this challenge is open to all U.S. institutions and we look forward to seeing those proposals coming in. The other thing we’re very proud of is the number of minority serving institutions that are involved in our challenge. This year we received 40% of our proposals came from minority serving institutions. Last year, that number was around 34%. 10% had historically been from community colleges. We’ve reached over 25 states. I want to say the number is somewhere between 26 and 30 at this point, and Puerto Rico. And so, we’re very happy that we’re getting the word out, that we’re open to all of these students to come and participate and bring those diverse ideas and backgrounds to the challenge. It only makes our challenge better. It only makes those solutions better. If I could point to anything coming up that students out there that are listening, or faculty or those who are just interested and want find a way to participate, we are having our test week in April, on the 23rd. There’ll be exit pitches provided by the students that will recap their work and tell more about the solutions that they’ve created. We expect that that will be open for attendees as part of a Microsoft live event that will be hosted by our team. We’ll have a panel of experts involved. Times and dates for that will be released at a later point. But you can always follow the NASA STEM Engagement Twitter account where that information will go out and probably be posted among other NASA social media accounts as well. But look for that to come up in April. And you can see the work that the students are doing and see how you might be able to get involved with SUITS in the upcoming challenge for 2022.

Paromita Mitra: So, in summary, I would just say that SUITS is an incredible opportunity for students to get involved, both from a software development perspective and really enhancing your skills from that angle. But then also, I think the humans in aerospace, the human spaceflight problem really presents a cross disciplinary problem space for a lot of different educational backgrounds to be involved in. And so, I know that personally for me, design team experience in undergrad and graduate school was pivotal in the some of the skills I’ve translated into my career today. And so, I’m glad and honored to be a part of SUITS and really enable other students to learn in the field of augmented reality and human spaceflight.

Host: This is a very exciting challenge, Brandon and Paromita. Thanks so much for coming on Houston We Have A Podcast to describe all this fantastic and very interesting and futuristic really, work. Really appreciate your time.

Paromita Mitra: Thanks, Gary, so much for having us on Houston We Have A Podcast. It’s been an honor to be here.

Brandon Hargis: Yes. Thanks, Gary, for having us on Houston We Have A Podcast. We’re really excited about talking about SUITS today. Thank you.

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Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. I hope this piqued your interest on participating in some of our STEM engagement activities that we have at NASA. If you want to learn more about this program in particular, it’s part of the Microgravity University that we have. It’s based here at the Johnson Space Center. So that website is microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov. You can go to our episode webpage. We’ll have a link there, right there, where you can go from the episode webpage right to the Microgravity University site. We have a lot of other podcasts that you can listen to in no particular order from this podcast, Houston We Have A Podcast. A few times on this episode we reference the xEMU. It’s one of the spacesuits that we have. We did an episode on that suit and a lot of the details of that suit. It was Episode 120 “Artemis Spacesuits,” and we talked in depth about that spacesuit. You can go check that out, if you want to learn more about that spacesuit. But really, you can listen to any of our episodes in no particular order, nasa.gov/podcasts. This is where we’re located as well as a variety of other NASA podcasts that we have across the agency. You can talk to us on the NASA Johnson Space Center pages of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Just use the hashtag #AskNASA on your favorite platform to submit an idea for the show and make sure to mention us at Houston We Have A Podcast. This episode was recorded on October 28th, 2020. Thanks to Alex Perryman, Pat Ryan, Norah Moran, Belinda Pulido, Jennifer Hernandez, Anisha Engineer and Dynae Fullwood. Thanks again to Brandon Hargis and Paromita Mitra for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and some feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think. We’ll be back next week.