(Apr 16, 2013)

During the first week of April 2013, the Attitude Planning Exchange Tool (APEX) went live on-console for International Space Station (ISS) mission operations at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). APEX is now the primary planning tool for ISS Attitude Determination and Control Officers (ADCO). Designed to replace multiple legacy planning tools and processes, APEX incorporates extensive workflow management capability in addition to traditional planning and scheduling functionality. ADCOs in ISS mission control now use APEX to plan all attitude and thruster reconfiguration events as well as negotiate changes in advance with their Russian counterparts. On April 3, 2013, the ADCO on console executed the first activity, an aft progress reboost, from APEX-produced products.

Since 2011, the Ensemble team has been working with personnel in NASA JSC's Mission Operations Directorate (MOD). This is the third software product from our team to go live on-console for ISS mission operations. The Ensemble team, which includes members from the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) group within the Human Systems Integration Division (Code TH) and the Planning and Scheduling group (Code TI), contributed to the design, implementation, testing, support, and delivery of the software tool.