Lunar Extravehicular Activity: Enhanced Decision Making in a Virtual Environment

With the forthcoming goal of returning humans to the Moon, NASA’s Artemis program will be tasked with ensuring the safety of its crew. An inherently dangerous undertaking, extravehicular activities in future missions will be executed from the lunar South Pole, a region previously unexplored by humans and which presents unique challenges. To aid in decision making regarding alternative traversal paths, three digital engineering enablers are considered: an engineering metaverse leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse, a virtual representation of an astronaut on the lunar surface abstracted through a predictive physiological model, and virtual reality for multi-sensory interaction with a digital environment. In a two-step approach, alternative paths are first evaluated on quantitative metrics using conventional analysis and then interrogated in a virtual environment. Through this spatial representation, the virtual environment augments decision making by providing additional operational context and insight into qualitative criteria such as visibility. Future work includes incorporating a rover into the scenario, exploring contingency operations, integrating further terrain overlays in the virtual environment, and augmenting the physiological modeling workflow with additional metrics.