Mission Transmission - Space Apps Challenge

Mission Transmission| Can You Hear Me Now?

Awards & Nominations

Mission Transmission has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

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.

Delay Relay

Summary

In this day and age we are all used to instant, real time text, speech and even video. All of these luxuries will disappear when humans travel to Mars, with delays in communication reaching up to 23 minutes. Delay Relay is a game that explores the problem in the context of a mission to Mars. The game will ask players to solve challenges between Mars and Mission Control, with various levels of delay in sending messages between the two. As players solve missions in creative ways, their methods and techniques can be used to inform NASA on the best communication strategies for various levels of delay.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Delay Relay is a game that simulates the communication delay between Mars and Mission Controls. Players have to solve various challenges though out the journey from Earth to Mars. Those in Mission Control and Mars can speak to their respective groups instantaneously but exchanging information between the two simulates the actual delay astronauts would experience in space. The concept of 'playing alone together' is becoming more and more popular. By creating a multiplayer game with a strong narrative, fun missions, and real challenges faced by astronauts, we can scale this game beyond the space-community and increase social engagement with the public.

Not only does the game allow players to become aware of the challenges faced in a Mars Mission in a fun and engaging way, but NASA can also learn from the communication strategies that the most successful players employ in a crowdsourced manner. The game will simulate all of the permutations of the communication variables (time delay, energy cost to send a message, and size of data) and the strategies of the teams that successfully solve the challenges will be aggregated and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively to develop new methods of communication for NASA. Frequency of communication, message formats and even the optimal levels of communication-risk the players take can all be learning points from the game.

We want to harness public creativity to find techniques to overcome communication challenges. By forcing people to address the problems in context, where the goals and constraints are representative of what astronauts and mission control might face, we ensure that the creative communication methods that teams end up using can directly be applied in actual missions.

How We Developed This Project

Mission Transmission was inspired to solve the more human aspects of space flight. We felt that the communication delay between Earth and Mars presented a unique opportunity to address a social problem with potential for significant consequences during the mission.

When we began to dissect the problem, we quickly realized that it was extremely difficult to solve the problem without being in the same context as the astronauts in the mission. We also felt that NASA would also be able to solve this problem on a technical level, but could use some help in getting new perspectives on communication strategies.

While ideating, we came up with the idea of gamifying the journey, which would not only contextualize the problem so you can develop and test relevant solutions, but also democratize it to the public in a fun way!

We took relevant mission data and spoke to people who have had experience simulating Mars mission on earth about when and how they would communicate with mission control. Based on this, we created missions and characters for the game and developed a mechanism for NASA to translate the successful strategies into actionable communication protocols for a Mars mission.

In order for NASA to extract and develop relevant strategies for their mission to Mars, we created a dashboard that aggregates the data from each game and highlights the successful techniques. Users can also dig into the specifics of each game to do a more qualitative assessment of games they find interesting.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Using JPL's HORIZON data source, we can incorporate the current distance between Earth and Mars to calculate how long messages would take to send to ensure that the parameters we are capturing will reflect the actual delays astronauts will experience.

The missions in Delay Relay can be inspired by astronaut logs and technical/human issues faced by previous NASA missions. The content of the mission can also make sure use of weather data, air temperature, pressure from InSight to add us a sense of realism to the experience.

Audio, Images and Video from NASA can be incorporated within the game to make the missions more tangible and immersive.