Robots in Space, Politics on Earth: Behind the Scenes on NASA's Robotic Spacecraft Missions

Users, politics, and organizations can often feel like abstract qualities that impinge on good systems in unpredictable ways. But there is some regularity to these social factors, some ways to offer predictions, and social science observations that can make system administrators' jobs easier. This talk offers success stories and lessons learned from behind the scenes on some of NASA's most famous robotic missions. Even in these most technical of projects, systems are infused with social, political, and organizational elements from the bottom up, and examining exactly how these dynamics play out in space exploration demonstrates new ways of understanding the infamous "Layer 8".

Janet Vertesi is a sociologist of science and technology at Princeton University. She has worked with NASA's robotic space missions as an ethnographer for over eight years, including the Mars Exploration Rover mission, the Cassini mission to Saturn, and a planned mission to Europa. Author of the forthcoming "Seeing Like a Rover: How Robots, Teams and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars" (University of Chicago Press, 2015), she is also an active member of the Human-Computer Interaction community, with publications at ACM CHI, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Ubiquitous Computing. Vertesi is a Fellow of the Center for Information Technology Policy and an advisory board member of the Center for Data & Society.