MissUs?| Can You Hear Me Now?
Can You Hear Me Now?
Red Rover Satellite School
Summary
Communication between Earth and Mars is frustrating. But anyone with the Red Rover Satellite School App can even walk Grandma through some of the complicated concepts of communicating in deep space. Juggling fun challenging tasks, getting fully immersed in the experience of latency and lost data, interacting with easy to understand data sets that monitor the variables for successful transmissions. Don’t forget to watch the bandwidth! As a graduate, the user will be able to take their knowledge deeper and make informed decisions such as this issue...what will you do for faster internet?
How We Addressed This Challenge
What is it?
Design an interactive application to explore the challenge of communicating with astronauts on Mars from Earth.
Why is it important?
We have plans for more human missions to Mars and that means we have to address our current communication abilities and technological limitations so we can match our needs for higher bit rates and reliability necessary for deep space communication. In order to create an internet network in Mars, it will take thousands of satellites, trillions upon trillions of dollars, as well as time, and manpower. All listed are limited; so for now we have to rely upon our creative ingenuity and some patience to dream up some interesting solutions.
Currently, our capabilities are not equipped for instantaneous communication between Earth and Mars. Our system has an overwhelming list of difficulties that make communication frustrating and time-consuming. The normal user will have a hard time imagining the scenario in which we can’t call someone instantly on the phone or browse arbitrarily on the internet since there’s so much we take for granted. Technology has grown leaps and bounds over the last 64 years since Sputnik was launched. Young users might not recognize old communications such as the telegram or rotary phone in which more limitations were present and people struggled through with adversity. That’s still a far reach from the latency and data loss one might experience with communication to and from Mars, but this knowledge could give this younger generation of users a reference to struggling with communication and give them more appreciation for science and technology. We have to change people’s perspectives in order to give them the scope of the issues we face with deep space communication.
Unfortunately, the technical and conceptual aspects of deep space and its challenges can be difficult to convey. It is very easy to get lost in the technical jargon, flying numbers and datasets, and a never-ending list of 3-letter acronyms. Some people might be turned off pursuing this topic or even science in general. In order to spark interest, science needs to be provocative, engaging, and a community activity.
Team Insights
According to our research, we found that storytelling naturally allows the user to make connections, be willing to receive information, and allows for easier navigation through complex ideas. Storytelling is easier to remember and also more engaging to the user vs. a list of data, and “Jerome Buner’s research suggests that facts are 20 times more likely to be remembered if they’re part of a story.” [1]
It was also interesting to see the benefits of storytelling broken down by Paul Smith in his article “The Leader as Storyteller: 10 Reasons It Makes A Better Business Connection” in which he states storytelling is:
- Simple
- Timeless
- Demographic proof - all types of demographics can relate
- Contagious
- Easy to remember
- Inspirational
- Appeals to all types of learners
- Fits better to where learning happens
- Puts listener into mental learning mode
- Shows respect for the audience [2]
Understanding these concepts make us, the designers, cognizant of the user's overall experience as they interact with the app. We can take advantage of how the user’s mind works to create the best experience possible with the benefits of teaching very complicated concepts of deep space communication.
Our research shows that “the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds” [3] versus strictly data or words. Through evolution, “half of the brain is directly or indirectly devoted to processing visual information.” [4] In fact, we found out that “at least 65% of people are ‘visual learners.’” [5] We also learned about kinesthetic learning strategies. Kinesthetic learning is combining visual and auditory sources in which the experience is multisensory. The benefit of this type of learning is that it taps into various areas of the brain making the impression of the experience more lasting and other connections can be made.
If we tap into this ingrained function in the brain, we can enable the user to maximize their absorption of the data and experience, by adding graphic elements which were one of our primary goals for this app.
What does our App do?
We built a juggling app that allows the user to be immersed in the pain and frustration of deep space communication and still have an enjoyable gratifying experience.
We are able to use NASA Datasets which allow the user to interact with some complicated numbers such as orbital projections to figure out the position of Earth and Mars which affects satellite transmission.
We also based our app on visual and kinaesthetic learning to maximize information absorption.
We applied the tools of storytelling to immerse the user into the world of deep space communication so they would be a willing participant and follow the paths we created for them.
Red Rover Satellite School App has 5 Functions:
- Interactive tool to teach user fundamental challenges of communication with Mars
- Intricate storylines, inviting the user to immerse themselves into the process
- Graphic information such as positioning of Mars, Earth, and satellites and how that affects deep space communication
- Turn hard concepts into easy to understand bite sized visual elements
- Educate the user to a point where the user can make informed decisions beyond the app.
Here are some of the features:
- Interactive current status area where the user can check the status of weather, positions of satellites, and date/time conversions for Earth and Mars
- Tasks List - track all the incoming tasks that make you interact with deep space concepts and problems
- Mailbox - send and receive messages and become fully immersed in engaging storylines, embedded within them are concepts of deep space communication in a way where you can actually experience the difficulty first hand
- Notifications that bring attention to other factors such as notable events that could affect transmissions such as Solar Conjunctions and approaching space junk
- The last feature at the end of the user experience is where the user is invited to think about and/or send his or her own feedback on a current issue that we are facing that would affect deep space communication, and we should consider right now. Users could be part of the solution now that they understand some of these concepts. How would you bring the internet to Mars? Would you sell your data to big companies for a faster internet?
How does it work?
Register yourself into Red Rover Satellite School, and you’ll become a student studying deep space communications by experiencing it first hand.
You will interact with your professor, and be given a set of tasks as part of your studies. Some of these tasks allow you to interact with data and correspond at least one of the 10 things we identified as obstacles to deep space communication. For example, we’ll have an interactive graphic of the Earth, Mars, and Sun. The distance between Earth and Mars affects latency in communication(delay in transmission). Your task is to figure out what would happen when you move Mars in its orbit. What is the highest latency where data is slower and find the lowest period where the data latency is lower? We were able to pull data from NASA and convert the positions of millions of kilometers into points on a phone. The position of Earth and Mars corresponds to dates which you can adjust with a slider, and you can submit your answer when you get it in the correct position. If you get it wrong, there will be a hint that can lead the user in the right direction. After completing this task, this would be a good opportunity to note the solar conjunction where the Sun completely blocks transmissions, which the user will get to absorb that information in the visual. (It will be nice in the future to also include the angle between the planets, since it also affects the latency due to the position of the Sun. Because of the time considerations we couldn’t include it in this prototype. Plus, we can add small bits of information gradually so the user will not get too inundated with data.)
At the same time, you will also receive messages from friends and family in which the messages might also be affected in at least one of the ways transmissions could be affected. We thought about obscuring the messages from data loss so the user will have to kind of decode and wait for responses in anticipation. We also thought this would be a good opportunity to show the comparison of bit rate for the different types of files you could send such as audio, images, videos, and text. It would be interesting for the user to have to weigh their options (since it would affect their bandwidth and time, etc.), and see what happens. We thought that to make it fun, we would put the user through funny scenarios which the photo message that was sent is so bad nothing could be seen in it or maybe there could be a puzzle that needed to be completed since you only get sections of the image or audio files at a time.
The user will also be given notifications that will pop up informing them of various issues such as important events to be aware of such as an incoming solar storm shutting down communications or approaching space junk to a satellite.
What do we hope to achieve?
Number one, we hope that the user will have fun! In this way, we will have plenty of opportunities to immerse them in scientific data related to deep space communication, complex concepts, awareness of different perspectives in a way that is memorable and applicable. As people become more aware of deep space technology and the concepts behind it, there could be more contributors to the solutions to the problems we face. We believe anyone can be a scientist and be problem solvers. We hope that through the use of this app, our users will understand the messages we conveyed and will be able to apply some of this knowledge in their lives. That is why we left them with something to think about at the end of our app along with an easy way to communicate with NASA about their ideas of solutions.
How We Developed This Project
Our team was inspired to choose this project because we thought that this was an interesting problem to explore. We had a diverse set of team members, and we thought that with all of our skill sets, we could properly give a user a great experience with our team’s twist on the interactive app that explores deep space communication. We have a few engineers, one designer, one former film/tv industry member now mom/entrepreneur, and one Electrical Engineering Master student. Together we have a broad range of experiences to pull from, and together we tried to create interesting scenarios, tasks, and beautiful layouts for our users to get immersed.
Most of our team had experience in coding Swift for iOS; so we chose that platform for our interactive application.
Of course, we had lofty dreams of the ultimate app so we had to first dream up the impossible app with colorful characters, etc, and then prioritize the important features that could properly display our solution under the time constraints. Especially, since this was our first hackathon and our first time working together.
We used Trello to organize ourselves and our data. There was so much data on satellite communication and other related topics. Some of which were easy to read and some of which were really difficult with a lot of math equations.
Through our research combining through all the different ways communications could be disrupted, we have identified 10 main factors that could pose as obstacles for successful transmission. After having an extensive understanding of these problems and the scenarios in which this could occur, we could then create authentic and interesting scenarios for our user to either be immersed in or introduced to.
- Time Sync - Clocks need to be in sync
- Line of Sight - Signal needs to have a direct line of sight, no obstruction such as Solar conjunction
- Relay - Adding relays might make it more efficient for communication, relays might not be as powerful as ground satellites, and higher chances of data loss
- Power - Limitations on power budget (solar powered or nuclear power source), ex: solar panels not in range causes the transmitted signals to be faint, cannot reach other receiver
- Beam size - Includes narrow frequencies and signal strength minimizing noise
- Position - Location of satellites (space and ground)
- Act of God - Things out of our control such as debris, radiation, temperature fluctuations, solar flare
- Bandwidth - It is limited in deep-space communications
- Noise - Cosmic Noise decreases the SNR
- Ethics - Ex: Do you want to give big companies your data in exchange for faster internet?
We basically broke apart the data and tried to see how we could make it graphically easier to understand. For example, to understand signal amplification, we drew a cylinder with a small opening on one end to represent input and a large opening on the other end for the output to represent the mechanism to amplify signals. On one hand, if the signal strength is weak, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) will be low, and according to Shannon–Hartley theorem, the capacity of the channel will drop resulting in ineffective communication. On the other hand, if it is too much it may overheat the communication devices, and therefore shut down the communications to recover and cool down.Furthermore, power issues are also affected by the distance between the two satellites. The farther away from each other, the more power is needed to send the transmission or it will just have a weak signal. So we took these concepts and decided that this would be a good example to illustrate the cause and effect of these variables. Plus it could be funny when the transmission is sent and the user decides to use less power than necessary (the result would be the receiver wouldn’t have received the transmission). It could affect subsequent tasks within the app. The user will know the next time if there’s a similar task that the power will need to be considered (to get a successful transmission). Thus the user learns from mistakes.
We created digital sticky notes of our favorite ideas. We voted on the features that we had to have in the app. That included graphics interpretations and data loss comparisons. Then we took some ideas and created scenarios and wireframes. One of the ideas was Gremlins in space where we could have a chance to see the inner workings of mechanisms of the technology because Gremlins could have the ability to play inside the satellites and antennas. While it was a fun idea, it wasn’t feasible with the time constraints. Another idea was Postman Mars where the user was a lonely postmaster in charge of facilitating the transmissions between Earth and Mars. Sometimes the Post Master had to figure out why transmissions failed and perform tasks. There were a few issues that were brought up, and we set that aside. We had tried to create a binary type app inspired by a couple of existing apps in which the user is totally immersed in the experience of communicating with an astronaut in which the user becomes a friend to this virtual pal and is now vested in his/her adventure. It was missing the graphic elements that we wanted to portray some of the tough concepts, so we set that aside from keeping in mind how we loved the user’s reaction to such a simple app such as that because of its storytelling. We had a construction worker in space receiving instructions to build various items. There was another app that required giving/performing space commands to position satellites with a time limit inspired by Space Team App that would get harder and harder as the communication became more difficult. After exploring all of these different routes what we settled on was a combination of the postman and the binary app in which Red Rover Satellite School arose to the top of our ideas because where else do you go to learn about deep space communication? The postman transformed into a student and the tasks became school-related, and we were able to add the binary experience to the messaging feature where some scenarios could result in funny outcomes. One of the ideas that stood out was Grandma struggling to change her old thoughts of normal Earth communication and sending messages to the user who might have to decipher things and be patient with his Grandma’s transmissions. She became the mascot of our solution! We believed that it would be easier for you judges to envision Grandma struggling to figure out the complexity of deep space communication and the user willing to walk through it for her so everyone can have a successful transmission. We hope that you agree. We started to add little details to give it a more school feel to the experience. We have the Red Rover mascot, and we hoped that some people would feel nostalgic about the “Red Rover” song that kids would learn in elementary school. We also thought that the school theme could open doors to more relevant scenarios such as incorporating school events, virtual socials, eventually, etc. Also, the school colors had to be red, of course!
We created wireframes and experimented with the look of the app. We experimented with portrait and landscape versions, and settled on portrait for the ease of use for the user. We tried to think logically through the steps the user would take in order navigate through the app and create various flow charts. This was a very difficult process as we encountered issues in creating the storylines and flows that would make sense. Sometimes we had to abandon some great ideas because of our constraints. There were at least some basic concepts and scenarios for each of the 10 factors that affect deep space communications. We had to draw each one out in order to figure out the best idea.
Then all of our excitement of the idea was somewhat deflated by the realities of the time constraint and skill set. We couldn’t possibly do everything we wanted within 48 hours.
We were able to come with our list of needs: 1) Interface for the user to take in the idea that he was entering into a deep space community that needs him. 2) A messaging system. Only the first message demonstrates one of the obstacles in deep space communication 3) A task list, with one task that demonstrates a different obstacle in deep space communication. 4) If we had time, we would create one notification of another obstacle in deep space communication. Through this, we would be able to fully demonstrate our solution by the user's interaction and journey through
There are 4 aspects to this project. We had to identify:
- What are all the things that could affect communication between Earth and Mars?
- How are we going to make the user experience the difficulty of deep space communication and still make it a fun experience?
- What datasets could we include in this app, and how can we incorporate it in a way the user could interact and learn from it?
- Ultimately, what was the end goal of our app?
We primarily focused on these as our first priority in order to convey the best solution in our final project. If we had time or had encountered problems with our first ideas, we had a list of favorite ideas to fall back on. I think this was great for us since we did encounter some issues with our original direction and had to modify or plan some things differently. One of which was the final task in which there was a little more behind the app and explanation of how everything worked with the Professor. In essence of time, we cut the conversation very short! Also we wanted the user to experience sending a message reply back and choosing formats and seeing options that would affect the latency, but we had to just end the conversation loop with an error correcting code concept, but we thought that was enough to convey the latency and data loss Grandma and the user was experiencing with their conversation.
After we had worked feverishly on various stages of the project, we had ask some of our friends and family about their opinions of the project and if they had any suggestions for us. That really was integral to our final project. I had some great feedback from my Father-In-Law who had some knowledge of satellite communication technology. He pointed out some interesting things. One of which I tried to implement. He said that you cannot just have a normal conversation or browse the internet the way we are used to on Earth. Because of the latency, one must have to almost strategize, and I thought that was something we could incorporate in the app, and that's how the conversation with Grandma came about.
Personal Insights
Donna: I had no coding experience or true app designing experience. I had worked with my Brother-In-Law, Tim, on a small app, and loved it so much that I decided to do this competition. It was challenging to put together a team of people who have never worked together before, across different locations, time zones, lifestyles, skillset, personalities and personal experiences. I was definitely the dreamer with crazy ideas and lots to say. I tried to come up with scenarios and storylines for each type of obstacle knowing that we probably wouldn’t get to do them all. I had to let a lot of great ideas go, but I know that maybe one day we might be able to revisit this idea and see where it goes. We had our own personal version of experiencing communication difficulties, and I thought that this gave us some great insight. We channeled that energy and frustration into the creation of this project, and look we made an app. I am proud of our team.
Göktürk: During the challenge, I had a chance to work with a wonderful team. I was amazed by their commitment and passion. Although we had a 9 hour time difference, their energy kept me awake and helped me to enjoy this amazing challenge even more. Joining the team relatively late, I had to work extra hard to catch up with the other team members. Although I felt sleepy at 8.30 pm PST meeting, they always supported me. In return, being an electrical engineer I tried to explain the theoretical foundations as intuitively as I can. We have developed a fascinating educational app, which teaches non-engineers the fundamentals of deep-space communication. I hope this app helps the science and space community to gain new members with brilliant solutions.
Rene: This challenge was interesting because I was familiar with orbital mechanics, and aerospace concepts, but had very little coding experience. I got to help integrate that knowledge into an application that will hopefully teach others the challenges of outer space. It was challenging to go back and try to calculate the ephemerides of Earth and Mars, after years of not reviewing those concepts. In the end, I opted for exporting the data from NASA’s Horizon’s web interface because it was an easier integration for the current goal. That itself proved to be a challenge in order to create the data set that would work with our application. I am interested to see the future of this application. We had a diverse team, and it was interesting to see how everyone's knowledge came together and combined into a final product. I am excited to keep learning more about coding and application building. Also, it has motivated me to keep forcing myself out of my daily comfort zone.
Future of the App
User Experience
The goal is deeper immersion of the user in the app; so that they could feel as if they were going to a real school and interacting with real friends, family, teachers, and attending realistic feeling virtual sports events and activities. When users feel a part of a “community” they will want to return to the app to check in on their work and their friends, and it will give us more opportunities to give the user more information.
We want the user to be incentivized when they perform tasks and make decisions. A credit system could be implemented for resolving tasks. More credits are given when tasks are performed correctly and efficiently. Credits could be redeemed for access to relay satellites or increasing bandwidth temporarily to alleviate bottleneck of communication loads. Or maybe you have to make a special video call to Grandma that might require extra credits, but it’s worth it because she loves that kind of stuff. We would love the user to have the space version of “Penpals” called “BitPal”, and they could have intricate storylines and interactivity all with interruptions and data loss, latency, etc. Maybe your BitPal had a crazy story about finding Sp*8k, but he didn’t get the chance to finish the story before the satellite lost reception. The user will have to await anxiously...
A multiplayer version was an idea where users could decide if they were on Earth or on Mars. A leaderboard tracks tasks completed, and users would be able to message other real life users. There would be a randomizer that would affect the message in one of the 10 ways. For example: A message would be riddled with holes from the noise or maybe an audio file’s data came out of order because of blips in time sync issues. They could have special events: a “Space Surfing” Competition where users could compete against each other doing various tasks.
Increase Data Capabilities
In a perfect world, we would be able to see all the datasets available that affects effective communication such as: weather on Mars, weather on Earth, weather in Space, orbits and positions of satellites in space, catalogue of space junk in space, Mars and Earth Date/Time Calculator
Feature: A Deep Space Telemetry Segment where the user can figure out the various types of communication and have that links when the different communication technologies were implemented and how much capability (bits per second) were increased over time.
We would love to break down high level communication developments such as Quantum Communications. The theory behind it is mind boggling, but important in our quest for more effective communication technologies.
Social Media Accounts
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Data
In the current version of the app, we used Insight API to get the weather and the date on Mars. We also used JPL HORIZONS on-line solar system data to calculate the position of Earth and Mars relative to the sun. This data set allowed us to create a task where the user can change the positions of Mars and Earth in order to see the latency and explore terms such as space conjunction.
In an ideal world we would be able to feature the following data sets and APIs in our App:
- NASA Image and Video Library - plan to use photos and modify them as if they were altered from a transmission (a randomizer of issues such as resolution, loss of data, noise, etc)
- Data from Space Physics Data Facility https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/new_users.html
- Mars Rover Photos API - plan to use photos and modify them as if they were altered from a transmission (a randomizer of issues such as resolution, loss of data, noise, etc)
- SSC 4D Orbit Viewer from https://sscweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tipsod/
- Catalog of space junk
- Mars and Earth Date/Time Calculator
- SSC Locator to get the positions of the satellites https://sscweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/Locator.cgi
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
References
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