Theorists in the social and historical studies of science and technology have long explored how technologies are constructed alongside assumptions about the organization of scientific labor and ideologies of the human and the machine. Space science projects are perhaps the most iconic examples of large-scale scientific endeavor in which to test these sociotechnical assumptions, involving collaborations across disciplines, across organizations, across nations, and even across interplanetary distance. Building on existing engagements, this project will explore these interconnections in detail through ethnography, interviews, and archival work on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission and comparative case studies.
In earlier studies of the NASA Mars Exploration Rover mission, team members consistently characterized their mission as uniquely successful and harmonious as compared to other NASA-funded unmanned missions which were seen as hierarchical and fragmented. Whereas earlier missions allegedly suffered antagonistic relationships between members of the spacecrafts' science and operations teams, the Rover mission was purposefully organized so as to espouse different principles. In this study, the investigators ask: Is the Rover project as unique as members believe? What factors distinguish this project, as a sociotechnical system, from others? What characterizes the role of cyberinfrastructure as an element of their work? Answers to these questions will offer a detailed, grounded case study of high-visibility scientific work conducted under extreme conditions of distribution and virtuality, in a complex organizational setting. By engaging in comparative work, the project will draw out the particular importance of, and relationship between, organizational culture and structure in these cases of "interplanetary sociotechnical systems."
