Mars Odyssey

Mars Odyssey| Can You Hear Me Now?

Can You Hear Me Now?

Human missions to Mars are moving from the realm of science fiction to science fact. Your challenge is to design an interactive application to explore the challenge of communicating with astronauts on Mars from Earth.

Summary

Communication with the earth is one of the many challenges astronauts face while conducting missions to and on. Our team designed an interactive 3D game in which the player is an astronaut on Mars who makes a discovery and has to send a notification of it to the space station on Earth, but only after he learns about and navigates through the various Mars-to-Earth communication challenges. The game will present the player with several “tasks” that explore these challenges such as avoiding cosmic rays and clearing the path between Earth and Mars. To successfully send the message, the player has to complete all the tasks.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our team developed a 3D interactive game that simulates the Mars-to-Earth communication challenges. The main principle which our game is based on is taking NASA research and these complicated concepts, and simplifying them to make them easier to understand for general people, while feeling less like it’s a tedious task and more like it’s a fun, interesting game. This is why we believe this is the best approach to the challenge, because it does not require much prior knowledge and makes research discoveries accessible.

In the game, the player poses as an astronaut on a NASA Mars Mission where he is tasked with sending an important documentation message of a discovery he makes. To send the message, the player has to successfully solve multiple small challenges that correspond to and explain the different factors limiting Mars-to-Earth communication. We hope our game can increase public awareness and interest in Mars Exploration and the issues surrounding it in communication. We also hope our game is used in classrooms or at home to teach young children about Mars and its issues.

How We Developed This Project

Mars is thought to be the planet humans will inhabit in the future aside from Earth. This means that it’s important to care about and understand recent complications that delay or hinder the exploration of Mars or its communication with Earth. By teaching people about the issues, we are opening up the door for more creative minds that might be able to come up with solutions for these communication challenges. This is why our team chose this challenge.

Furthermore, our approach was to build an interactive game to integrate information with fun gameplay to make it more interesting. We approached the game development process by planning out how the game will be like, as well as familiarizing ourselves with the needed frameworks for game development. Our 3D game was developed in Unity using the C# programming language. We also used Adobe photoshop for design and Premiere Pro for video editing.

While working on the project, we faced multiple challenges. One of them was our team’s inexperience with the Unity framework so we took some time to understand how it works properly. Another challenge we faced was in writing a script for one of the levels. We had to write a more advanced code so we used documentation and online tutorials to be able to code that portion of the game. Another challenge we faced was the complication level of the information provided, so we had to understand it well and rewrite into easier versions without too much scientific terminology to make it easier to understand for our users.

But, fortunately, these challenges made us successful in the end. We were able to work on our game project. We made the information very accessible. We also made the graphics fun and engaging. On a personal level, we learned how to efficiently plan out and develop a project. We learned to do efficient research. We learned to use Unity and we learned to edit videos.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We depended mainly on NASA’s websites and available resources to do research on the factors affecting Mars-to-Earth communication. We also studied data from NASA’s Mars exploration missions to better understand the effect of each factor. All of this research was integrated as the information provided to the player in the game and also the way the tasks are presented is according to our NASA’s data and simplifications of it that we made.