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Would it be possible to set-up a message board section so people can dialogue with the FMARS researchers?
It seems that seeting up a message board simmilar to New Mars would encourage interest in the Mars Society and FMARS in general, it also acts as a means for every member of the Mars Society to feel they are a part of this program.
This could be linked to classroom exercises, or a tie in with the media.
In other words, free publicity- and it serves to establish wether the internet would make a useful communication tool for future Mars-nauts by trying this real world experiment.
Just a positive thought in otherwise pesimistic mind.
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I see no reason why the new mars webboards cannot be used. I think it is a good idea. The only problem is whether the proposed participants have internet access at the station and whether or not they have the time. If they are interestedit would be great.
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As far as I know, people at the FMARS and MDRS (desert station) already answer emails from schoolkids and the media. They just don't do it on a public forum, or at least, if they do they keep it pretty well hidden. They do keep pretty decent personal logs though, which are available on their website. Unfortunately someone's redesigned the website and all the archives have disappeared... let's hope they get put back up soon.
I certainly think it's a good idea that people from the FMARS and indeed other Mars Society projects contributed on this forum, and there's already a place for them to do it. I'll try to make a few enquiries about getting them posting here, but I can't promise anything anytime soon. I imagine that their time is quite limited, and also I might have to set up moderated forums or the like to make sure their time here isn't wasted. We'll see.
Editor of [url=http://www.newmars.com]New Mars[/url]
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Thank you, sounds good Adrian.
Even if there is just a place where people can leave questions, that researchers can answer at their discretion would be useful.
Or, you submit a list of questions and let us vote on which ones should be sent for them to answer (kind like an interview)
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I was on crew #4 this past spring, and we tried a "public interaction day" kind of thing very similar to what you're describing. It went over well despite a big snafu with the email address the public was initially given being offline for a while. As a crewmember, I found this a great way to describe what we were doing and found most of the questions to be very thoughtful. At the time, I thought it would make sense to have such a system available at all times.
The only problem would be in having the crew feeling obligated to answer questions promptly. We were constantly behind schedule on reports and maintenance tasks and, though the public interaction was a great change of pace, it was hard to find time to give it a lot of attention. I'll certainly suggest the idea to those involved with the analog stations.
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Actualy, this may be something that can be incorporated into the actual "science" of the base.
Any future Mars-nauts will more than likely have to do their share of PR work- establishing ways that might help this process now might be beneficial to any actual mars missions.
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It would be very interesting to put in the actual time delays nd see how it affects communications with a simulated command center. We have never had significant lag on a space mission before.
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