HelloMars| Can You Hear Me Now?
Awards & Nominations
HelloMars has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Can You Hear Me Now?
HELLO MARS
Summary
The biggest challenges for Mars mission execution are the ever fluctuating minutes length of delay and low communication throughput. We designed an interactive application to explore the challenge of communicating between Mars and Earth. This included developing the app and and network infrastructure.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We have developed a network infrastructure for Mars and Earth communication and created an application which helps astronauts navigate and perform missions. It makes remote missions possible. We hope to use it to gather scientific data about the planet and aid astronauts.
How We Developed This Project
We were inspired by the relevance of the challenge: it is a near future problem humans are going to face while stepping on a foreign planet for a first time. We are trying to be be prepared as much as we can.
We chose to emulate current ways communicating in AWS, meaning: Earth station, Mars Orbiter and device on the surface of Mars. Then, we aded router on Mars to help route the requests and provide intranet.
Then we built an application using Typescript, React Native and NodeJS which can communicate with Orbiter, through it - with Earth. Application is intented to be a mission helper and guide for astronauts on Mars.
Main problem we faced is the fluctuation of the delays and the many factors that have impact for it - planet rotation, orbiter position and device location - these are only a few variables to take into account.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We analyzed the demo mission of ESA and determined the principles of collecting data from robots. We examined all the data available inside a rosbag file, and understood that due to the low transmission bandwidth only the crucial data can be transmitted in real-time. That is: coordinates, azimuth and battery status.
Images and all other non-crucial sensor data has to be routed to local storage for saving and sending on off-peak hours of ground unit operation.
Project Demo
Demonstration is in slides:
https://www.canva.com/design/DAEJntdUP9g/Wgz_rQvMae66XAi-krhpCA/view?utm_content=DAEJntdUP9g&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=sharebutton
To download an app, see instructions in the slides.
(You will need expo app and scan a QR code with it)
Demo and app will also be uploaded at: http://mars.whatin.space/
Code repositories:
https://github.com/MonikaVen/mission_app
https://github.com/MonikaVen/earth_node
https://github.com/mikayzo/NASA-SpaceApps-2020
Data & Resources
The structure of DSN: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/scan/services/networks/deep_space_network/about/
Mission data archive: ftp://data.asc-csa.gc.ca/users/OpenData_DonneesOuvertes/pub/Lunar%20Exploration%20Analogue%20Deployment%20(LEAD)%20-%20Rover%20Data/
Mission overview: https://eyes.nasa.gov/
Using ROS:
http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/Recording%20and%20playing%20back%20data