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Per Google:
Mars 2020 Rover, 2020
Launch is currently scheduled for July 17, 2020, and it is expected touch down in Jezero crater on Mars on February 18, 2021.Mar 12, 2019
This post offers an opportunity for NewMars forum members to participate in a virtual expedition to Mars.
Each member who chooses to participate would record each Sol's consumables, and what should make this exercise interesting is that each participant would record the meals and beverages they would prefer, and certainly NOT what some scientist would specify in the absence of input from the expedition member.
This would be an opportunity for the MARKET to define demand, and NOT for some authoritarian figure or group to decide what is BEST for the crew.
There is plenty of time between now and July to work out details of how this might be done.
There is ALSO plenty of time to recruit qualified participants. The fact NewMars forum is constantly bombarded by Internet Sales Initiatives tells me that accessibility to this forum is not limited. It is within the realm of possibility that persons with the qualities needed to sustain a two+ year simulated flight might be drawn to the project, and that a significant number of them would have the stamina to persist through the entire (virtual) flight.
Note: I would appreciate someone confirming that the Mars 2020 Rover launch is planned for the same date as would be true for a populated expedition, if we were ready.
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This topic is dedicated to the memory of long time member [void].
Void Member Posts: 3,011 Registered 2011-12-29 Final Post: 2019-07-24 22:10:42
void's first post is: http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 33#p111433
void's last post is: http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 67#p158867
Void will be remembered as visionary, with range encompassing the entire Solar System, and a substantial temporal range.
***
A Virtual Mars Expedition is an opportunity for the Mars Society, via the NewMars.com Forum, to create an educational opportunity for 100 students from all nations and cultures.
What I have in mind would require a separate FluxBB web site for each "ship" of 100 participants, and while the traditional title for an adult leader of such a group in a simulated nautical setting would be "captain", I am intrigued by the connection with history if the leader of the expedition at the unit level is entitled "Centurion" (instead of Administrator) (FluxBB may force Adminstrator)
GW Johnson, as creater of the "EducationDoneRight" thread, I am wondering if you will be willing to take a leadership role?
Participants would be recruited to take part in daily updates to the web site, with information regarded as useful for mission planning and tracking, and would be expected to undertake educational activity related to the mission, in coordination with adult supervisors, such as qualified parents or teachers with an interest in the project and the time to take part.
Edit #1: Admission to Ship Sites
For security reasons, only student participants, their parents or guardians, and the NewMars forum personnel serving as moderators will have access to forums set up for individual "ship" communities.
The main NewMars forum would serve as a coordinating site for all Ship Site leaders.
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Last edited by tahanson43206 (2020-01-13 13:10:32)
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It may be possible to do much of this in a game mode or SIM game that allows for the choices to be made that effects out come. Make into a 3d viewer style where you give changes to cause and effect. Such as a dust storm is coming towards the working site where the choice of survival can play out based off from choices the individual can take in the game SIM for the dropping of power....give the players odds of survival based on the conditions changed for out come.
Here are a couple that come to mind:
Fire on the ISS, lunar base or Mars habitat or domes
"clark's calamity", when bad luck is all you have
Hypothetical Lunar Mission Profiles - How might we return to the moon?
Mars Simulation Project - MSP v. 2.76 released
Risk from rocket explosions on Mars
As for new recruits that would be great to see other educated individuals that want to be arm chair scientists or engineers.
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Here are other topics which would relate or would make a good sim...
An Educational Video Game
Take On Mars Simulator
Driving around the Real images of Mars
top 99 games worldwide - which do YOU rate?
Orbiter - Free Space Simulator
Computer economic simulations - until there's a sim-mars..
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Whats the best ps2 game - The ones you love the most
Virtual communities - Any of you heard about Second Life?
Exploritory Team For Mars Expedition Simulation - Mars Expedition Sim
Support creation of Mars First! virtual world
SimEarth 2 - Would you play it?
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For SpaceNut ....
OK .... << grin >> ... I ** think ** you are suggesting the opportunity of the 2020 flight in July could be a game of some kind.
In Post #6 you included a reference to Second Life ... I'm familiar with the environment, and appreciate all the work that's been done there.
What I had in mind when opening the topic was something a bit more cerebral.
Back in the olden days, when all kids had for entertainment was books, and the only computer available was their built-in neural network, it was possible to spend countless hours visualizing whatever words on paper could inspire.
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Tahanson43206:
I don't yet understand exactly what you are trying to do.
You're corresponding with someone who does not understand "virtual" anything. I started out in industry with a slide rule, like everyone around me.
Pocket calculators were not yet widespread. Desktop computers still a decade in the future.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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For GW Johnson re #8
Thank you for noting this initiative.
What I have in mind is to create an imaginary journey to Mars, timed to coincide with the actual flight of the Mars 2020 package.
SpaceNut has introduced some interesting ideas about adapting games. That's a bit more sophisticated than what I have in mind, but I can certainly imagine how it might become a significant factor at some point.
With your background and experience in mind, I am thinking of a set of 100 students who would be interested in a learning experience around orbital mechanics or aerospace engineering, or whatever discipline the group leader would want to pursue.
This would be set up with plenty of local support, starting with parents and including such local community members as have an appropriate background to serve as mentors and guides.
The entire expedition would take as much time as a flyby of Mars.
The "virtual" aspect is the computer mediated imaginary journey.
It would start with fundamentals of simple text messages delivered to a web site set up for the purpose.
At a minimum, these would include documentation of such considerations as meals consumed, weight measurement, exercise performed, and such other absolutely minimal expectations for a person who would actually be making the journey.
What would come out of this would be a set of people who have demonstrated a level of persistence that is uncharacteristic of young people in the modern age.
If you were to accept the opportunity to design a curriculum for day by day learning that would lead to some measurable skill level, you would (I suspect) have some idea of the level of student you were interested in working with.
At the same time, and in parallel, I am hoping other PhD level group leaders will be willing to lead groups on a 2 year computer mediated journey of learning with their particular specialties as the guiding structure.
The cost for all this should be quite low. Assuming the Mars Society accepts this opportunity, there will be charges for hosting the server software.
Those costs could be shared by the participant families for an amount such as $1.00 per month, but it could be less.
The key "expense" will be time.
I would consider it perfectly reasonable to cover minimal use of a slide rule, as an example of what could be designed into a curriculum.
A ** real ** Mars settler had better know how to perform calculations when all the electronics is fried.
(th)
Last edited by tahanson43206 (2020-01-14 15:33:47)
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Interactive web videos to serve as lessons of which the show can mix with real footage from places like the space port, space camp, maybe Murdoc station and lots of other such places to make it feel like you are participating. More places could be the mars and other analog sites as in Devon island or Utah as well as the others.
A big part can be the learning from visual and others from instruction. Then there is the hands on solving sort of like in the movie the Martian...
Something else to add to the mix is farming and greenhouse operations from soil to airponics, hydroponics and aquaponics....
Other things can be the food processing and packaging for space use.
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For SpaceNut re #10 and earlier posts about games for education or entertainment.
The human brain contains powerful mathematics computing capabilities. These are found in every person, because they are used for kinetic predictions needed for successful navigation of the real world. I have been thinking for some time, about the difference between those built-in capabilities, and the rarity of skill with abstract mathematics.
Your suggestions for games that might apply to the Virtual Mars Expedition topic inspired me to let the concept simmer for a few days. Now I'm back to offer a concept that I am hoping will inspire your creative energies to carry it further.
Imagine a player on a basket ball court, preparing to sink a 3 point shot, which for our many readers from outside the US, is a shot from outside an arbitrary distance from the basket.
Now imagine the ball in the player's hands is your spaceship, in orbit around Earth, and you are about the make a 3 point shot to land the ball on Mars as it passes by.
Now we can add some animation. The situation is not too different from skeet shooting, which features moving targets, but the shooter is in a fixed position.
We need to add more animation however. The situation is even ** more ** like an aerial dog fight in World War I, with both platforms moving.
Finally, we can add a familiar fixture in American life, the pinball machine.
A player impels a ball from the starting slot, and various forces action upon the ball to direct its motion.
What I am imagining is a computer animation game which allows the player to "land" a spaceship on Mars if the player points in the right direction, and adds exactly the right amount of force to the motion of the spaceship.
By using such a game, a player can harness the power of a computer (itself programmed with the physics rules underlying the motions involved) to arrive at force and direction information that could be used in real life to achieve the desired orbital transition.
In other words, I am proposing a hybrid computer-human system to compute the needed navigation inputs to move a space craft from Low Earth Orbit to Mars Low Orbit.
Such a program could (I am confident) run on any desktop or smart phone in common use today.
Tying back to the opening .... the human operator would use the same internal computing hardware and software to visually direct the trial-and-error process of refining the inputs until the simulated spaceship is pulled gently into the orbit of Mars, as that person would use to sink a 3 pointer on the basketball court.
(th)
Last edited by tahanson43206 (2020-01-15 08:29:49)
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Many TV shows, cartoons and even Utube videos have done just that in versions of the standing on the court ready to shoot that three pointer where the nerd is focused on the rise angle for distance, mass of the ball and force to which it must be pushed to get it to the hoop.remindings me of the old Madden football replay screen with the grease pencil drawing how on the virtual chauk board and where the players are moving in the play... Same things have been done with billard balls for pool and so on and so on.
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For SpaceNut re #12
Thanks for your examples of how the internal human physics calculator can be harnessed in real life, and in educational settings.
Can you stretch your discoveries to include the example of an Earth to Mars navigation system? One may already exist!
If not, it should be possible to develop one. There are a number of animation packages which contain accurate physics simulators.
Human beings operate complex vehicles with simple movements directed by the brain. Such vehicles embody vast amounts of knowledge, stored there through the efforts of thousands of highly trained individuals over many years. The human operators rarely have any idea how any part of the machinery works.
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I found these games on the chapter site http://colorado.marssociety.org/
Games/Simulations:
Mars Sim
Mars Colony
Surviving Mars
Terraforming Mars
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Repost for continued thoughts for mission:
cIclops wrote:To make the exercise valid for Mars exploration we need common denominators. Distance traversed, science payload, samples returned. For cost we can use either a simple total cost or cost per kg. if you can think of a better measure, than by call means suggest it.
The cost per km traversed, cost per kg of returned sample, cost per image - would all make sense.
Exploration cannot be measured in kg.
might as well make use of that exercise energy to do something useful like in pumping water to compressing air or even making electricity.
https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e8883301bb09c45c1d970d-800wi
https://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e8883301b8d280e543970c-800wi
So how much energy do we get depends on the person
power-potential-various-exercise-machinesPOWER PRODUCTION
Lat Pulldown: 594W/612W
Leg press: 450W/360W
Low Row: 306W/270W
Chest Press: 270W/189W
Machine Fly: 234W/189W
Leg extension 207W/126W
Triceps extension 198W/234W
Shoulder press 135W/162WENERGY PRODUCTION
Lat Pulldown: 9,9Wh/10,2Wh
Leg press: 7,5Wh/6Wh
Low Row: 5,1Wh/4,5Wh
Chest Press: 4,5Wh/3,15Wh
Fly: 3,9Wh/3,15Wh
Leg extension 3,45Wh/2,1Wh
Triceps extension3,3Wh/3,9Wh
Shoulder press 2,25Wh/2,7WhENDURANCE TRAINING
Stair stepper: 150 watt = 50 Wh in 20 minutes.
Rowing machine: 122 watt = 40.6 Wh in 20 minutes.
Cycling machine: 110 watt = 36.6 Wh in 20 minutes.
Crossfit: 50 watt = 16,.7 Wh in 20 minutes.
Steps: 35 watt = 11.7 Wh in 20 minutes.
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Virutal repost:
For SpaceNut re #98
Thank you for this interesting post, with the diagram and especially for the list of power potential of various exercise activities.
In recent days, I've been thinking about the opportunity offered by the launch of the Mars 2020 rover in July, to create a set of "virtual" expeditions for 100 students who would participate in an online activity supervised by a PhD level person, and lead by family and school personnel.
A requirement for ANY person making a trip to Mars would be a daily exercise schedule, and your list of energy potentials provides a way to measure performance by passengers and crew. I was thinking along the lines of inviting participants to report data from their personal lives such as food intake, exercise performed, and homework completed. The details of reporting would be worked out by the leadership of each group.
As described earlier in another topic, I am thinking along the lines of 100 students participating in a "virtual" ship, mediated by a dedicated FluxBB (or equivalent) online service. Membership in each ship would be by approval, so only the students, their parents or guardians, and supervising/leadership personnel would be able to log in.
An education theme for each ship would be the responsibility of the PhD level leader, and I would imagine it would reflect the field of expertise in which the leader has experience. However, as in many educational settings, "graduate assistants" would assist with management of assignment and assessment of student participation.
Originally, I was thinking of one ship with 100 students, but Elon Musk's recent vision of 1,000,000 people going to Mars suggested to me that 1,000,000 people involved in an activity like this is not unreasonable in the current age.
The cost in dollar/euro/yen terms is practically nothing. The FluxBB software is free, and the only cost to the sponsoring organization would be host server charges, which (I expect) would be quite low in today's cloud environment.
What ** is ** needed is time ... time and mental focus ... That holds true for the leadership of course, as well as for the students.
However, if this vision comes to pass, there could potentially be a number of folks following the flight of the 2020 Rover, and then the first several months of its stay on Mars (assuming a successful landing).
In any case, the "virtual" ship would "return" to Earth right on schedule for a real expedition, were one to have been planned for this launch window.
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SearchTerm:VirtualMarsExpedition
Students participating in a Virtual Mars Expedition could carry out activities very similar to the ones they would be engaged in if they were on an actual flight.
They would be performing exercise to maintain body fitness in microgravity.
They would be (hopefully) enjoying meals prepared for them by parents or care givers. Those could be documented by the participants for two reasons;
First, the record of the meals would inform mission planners, who would have available a data set accumulated over two years for each participant.
Second, the students themselves would have a record of the meals they (hopefully) enjoyed during the two years, and ** that ** would be available to them for planning trips they might consider taking on Earth.
In addition, the students would be carrying out mental development activities, just as they (surely) would on an actual flight.
These activities could include reading books or other materials assigned or suggested by mission leaders.
During the school year, the actual school lessons could be blended into the regimen, with readings, research activities and reports.
Recreation is an important part of a travel plan.
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Things like personal tablets filled with games, color by numbers ect something to keep the mind active will slow the onset of alzheimer's for sure even in advanced age it does work. These tablets can be used for many things beside pleasure as its a tool for the crewmember to make use of. Also with the camera's these are a means to document things that would not normally be known.
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For SpaceNut re #18
Thanks for adding to the concept for an educational experience for students organized around the Mars 2020 flight. It seems possible there are two scenarios under discussion, so I'll try to point them out. There is the student experience, which means each participant lives at home and takes part in the Virtual Expedition as an activity in an already busy day. The login would involve completing a set of tasks defined by the sponsor, such as reporting exercise completed over the past 24 hours, meals noted for collection of historical data for mission planning, and intellectual exercises such as reading books, articles or other material and (most importantly) reporting on them.
For participants in an ** actual ** expedition, that is quite another matter, and I think you've begun the process of developing an understanding of what that experience might be. The International Space Station might be a model to look at. The participants in ISS Expeditions do not have a lot of free time, but they do have some. Most of an ISS participant's time is allocated to station maintenance, personal needs, and scientific tasks.
In the case of a ** real ** Mars expedition, there would be relatively little "station maintenance" for the majority of the travelers, but there would be personal time, which could include games with computers or with others, but I would expect mission planners would build in scientific activities for each participant to keep them at the top of their game for the planned activities upon arrival.
Edit: A friend in the radio astronomy community just reminded me that a ** real ** Mars expedition would be a rich and valuable environment for radio astronomy. The expedition will be increasingly away from the radio noise of Earth, and able to receive faint emissions from a spherical volume of space. There exists now radio receiving equipment able to digitally identify the incoming direction of signals using electronic means instead of physical beam forming, so the expedition could listen on many frequencies in all directions.
In the case of the student experience, I am imagining the influence of knowledgeable individuals serving as "Expedition leaders", who would plan out learning activities in coordination with the school or other educational institution attended by each student.
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Last edited by tahanson43206 (2020-01-31 06:11:43)
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The same would be true for lunar or mars astrtonomy but for a station circling you also gain the observation post from high to watch over the one you are going around as well.
Education done right needs to include not only sciences but one on unit use and precision measurement. This coupled with with like units correctly display such as atmospheric pressure can be displayed is pascal, bars, PSI to just name a few considerations for the notation when making reports for other.
The report writing needs to be to the point for quality versus quantity containing the specifics in a clear form.
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For SpaceNut re #20
Thanks for adding the important educational element of standardized scientific units and the art of precision measurement.
I'd like to add a bit of perspective to the proposal I'm working on with you at this point. Hopefully other forum members will be inspired to contribute to development of a concept that will pass muster with funders.
Earlier I offered the number of 100 students as the ideal complement of a "Virtual Expedition" ship. The human race has a very long history of working successfully with that number of individuals.
I'd like to add for an outer range goal the number of 1,000,000. That is the number Elon Musk has tossed out in one of his visionary speeches, and it works well for the Virtual Expedition concept, because it would yield 10,000 FluxBB installations running on many fewer servers, since one server can handle many installations of an Internet Bulletin Board package.
1,000,000 students is a tiny fraction of the global student population, and the resources needed to pay for a server are low, in the present age, due to the success of the Cloud data storage and server model.
For SpaceNut ... can you imagine yourself gathering a community of 100 students to participate in one of these groups?
A scenario that seems feasible (to me at least) is to find a good sized high school (or multi-level school under the right circumstances) and then to find an inspired and inspiring teacher willing to take on the responsibility of organizing the local "expedition".
Please keep in mind here that we are talking about an educational experience mediated by an online service, and consuming about 15 minutes per day of online time. More time than that will be required for a participant to complete the various activities that would be part of the experience.
Exercise: Space travelers for the foreseeable future will need to maintain the tone of their bodies by carrying out vigorous exercise. Since exercise is good for students anyway, the activity would be prescribed by the program, documented by the student, and noted as part of the student's records which will accumulate over time, to show the suitability of the individual to participate in a real expedition.
Learning: Students are in (or should be in) a learning mode all the time, so the Virtual Expedition leaders will add learning activities in cooperation with local educators to achieve objectives defined by the program.
This forum has one certified and experienced educator in the active membership, and very well have more who are less active.
I am hoping this discussion will inspire thinking about what a two year education experience might look like, if organized around the Mars 2020 rover flight and deployment on Mars.
Finally, the concept for this Virtual Expedition is to follow the timeline of a real expedition, which would follow the same path as the Mars 2020 rover for the outbound leg, would stay on Mars with the rover for a period of time, and then return at the appropriate time to Earth, for a total mission time of about two Earth years.
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Classroom size for my state are in the 25 to 30 range with an entire grade near 100 students. The town does have an after school communitity action recreational center that again have very low numbers which make use of its programs. My town in under the assumption that they should be in it for a profit and not service to the community.
A lot of what would be done on a website could be set up simular to the forum for a structure as a section for class where topics could be locked by the admin as in a read mode so as to not allow posting while the student would have a login for there folder area to post results to there course topic.
I agree short periods of class time and entry is a must and as you indicated anything more than a 1/2 hour is a chance to lose attention of the student.
Where I work I still have blocks of subject classes for becoming qualified for the work and requalifications to stay being able to do the work. The most class time I have had a one time is an 8hr shift at first plus test to pass with a requal no more than 3 years later of 1 to 4 hours at most to make sure after a quick review of the subject a test to show you can retain the knowledge required. The tests are somewhat design to allow for you to pass with a 75% grade for the worker and an 80% for supervisors. Posistions that require some knowledge for those in the upper ranks have different course geared to what they need to know of the subjects to manage those below them.
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For SpaceNut re #22
First, thank you for your description of a program of continuing education for staff or an organization that I have not heard of before.
None of the organizations I worked for offered (or required) anything like what you've described. However, I ** have ** heard of or read about recertification programs for various licensed trades. Most of the American model I've heard or read about seems to be incentive based. For example, compensation of teachers has been (in the past and perhaps still) adjusted based upon self-directed educational development.
And! Thank you for considering my question about building a Virtual Expedition "ship" from members of the local community.
In reality, it seems (to me at this point) that it would take a fairly large community to find 100 students who would be both interested in this undertaking and capable of carrying it out. This is a two year commitment, and few (if any) students have EVER made a commitment that long. Many will start and drop out.
In real life, were they on an actual expedition, this would be an unsatisfying situation. In the case of the Virtual Expedition, there would be no hard feelings as the participant pulls the plug on the undertaking. Many of us have done something similar at the college level, when we start a course, realize it is not a good fit, and bail out before grades start counting.
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As far as grading the retention of knowledge how else are we going to know if someone has even bothered to read or perform the activity in the planned expidition? Good instruction after taking the tests are done by going over the answers that garnered an incorrect response when reviewing the information one has learned. In Math it is show the work steps and one can review where the error occured.
Find and collect accuplacer and other such tests would be a good start for education module concepts to work from. Look for the simularities of what should be known for each as a core module to build for general knowledge.
One can design modules around the systems for how they work for a crew and test for how you retain the learning. As for the expedition one could test via failure modes of conditions that a man might see along the travel and stay on mars. Example such as the oxygen electrolysis machine for waste water recovery fails, how much air do you have in reserves, what other systems would be effected by not processing the waste water, how much air is in the station/cabin ship area for when will you reach the need to correct for carbon dioxide build up ect....
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For SpaceNut re #24
Thank you for posting the important questions about the education process. These questions vex educators at all times and in every culture, I feel sure.
Some years ago I ran across a software program that addressed the question of how to help newcomers to English to learn the language more rapidly through a computer mediated process that they might if left to drift on their own, in the absence of sufficient volunteer person-power to give them individual attention 24 hours per day.
Of course, giving the individual attention 24 hours per day for language learning (and other learning) is what parents do, and have done for ever.
However, the problem addressed was how to provided learning to folks who need it when human resources are limited or missing altogether.
The program was similar to ones developed for children, but adapted for adults.
In thinking about your question, I think the program could be adapted for an online environment of the kind we are discussing here.
As a reminder, when operating in conjunction with an established education program in a US school, this process would (probably) qualify as an elective, with approval by the governing team in the school.
Setting that aside for a moment, I'll try to describe what I remember of the software I saw, in hopes of adapting it for the online expedition concept under discussion here.
First of all, the program was text based. The entire goal was to insure that English words pass through the brain of the student in a verifiable way.
I should add that merely passing words through a brain does not in itself insure learning. There has to be a minimal level of engagement by the student.
The text from a resource (for example, a book chosen to be of interest to the individual student) is fed into the program. It parses the text and displays it on a screen with the first word highlighted (as I recall the highlighting at that point was yellow).
The student is invited to touch the highlighted word (on a touch screen) or click a mouse on a standard screen. The word is then spoken aloud by the software. The highlighting changes to green, and the next word in the sentence is highlighted in yellow.
(Note: this software was written before speech recognition became an option. Addition of speech recognition would surely help with learning)
The process continues until the student reaches the last word of the sentence, at which point the entire sentence is read aloud with proper cadence and texture for that particular sentence in the context of the text of which it is a part.
The next sentence then appears on the screen and the student continues until tired.
At that point, the student selects "Pause" or a similar button, and the work is saved to be resumed later.
Other features (as I remember them) include the ability to replay the readout of any word on the screen, or the entire sentence as many times as desired.
In the case of the question you posed in #24, this concept could be adapted to the STEM subject matter I would expect would be the focus of an education plan for students embarked upon a two year learning experience.
Thanks again for your helpful question.
(th)
Last edited by tahanson43206 (2020-02-02 08:54:46)
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