Here's the Latest From Madame Mars

A DOCUMENTARY FOR OUR NEWEST SPACE AGE

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Madame Mars is a transmedia production designed to prepare all of us for our futures in space, whether orbiting Earth, returning to the moon, or colonizing Mars – and worlds beyond.

MARCH 2016

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THIS MONTH:
EXCLUSIVE TO MADAME MARS!
The Man Behind "Mars 2030"

M.I.T. grad student Sydney Do's 2015 Mars One feasibility study led to an opportunity to collaborate with Fusion Media as they developed NASA's new VR game, Mars 2030, premiering at this week's mega-music/media/tech festival, South by Southwest (SXSW), in Austin, TX.

Despite working nonstop with game developers to complete the project in time, Do (pictured here test-driving a Mars rover prototype at NASA's Johnson Space Center) graciously took time to answer a few questions from Madame Mars.

MM: What is the Mars 2030 experience like?

SD: Mars 2030 revolves around the first landing of humans on Mars. The crew, a diverse group of people representing the world’s major space agencies, spends 500 days on the surface of Mars before returning to Earth. The goal of Mars 2030 is to provide as realistic an experience as possible of what it will be like to live and work on Mars.

The Mars 2030 experience consists of a series of self-contained missions ranging from going on a spacewalk, to performing maintenance inside the hab, to driving a pressurized rover across the Martian surface. The user is guided through a set of tasks in a manner similar to the way an astronaut would follow instructions to accomplish mission objectives. As the user interacts with the environment, optional information vignettes appear that the user can open to learn more about a particular feature of the environment (e.g. the technology being used or a fact about the local geology).

The experience prioritizes realism in the look and feel of being in the Martian environment.

MM: Where on Mars does story take place? Why this location chosen?

SD: The Mars 2030 habitat is located at Jezero Crater, a site that, along with about a dozen others, has been considered as a landing site on Mars for quite some time now. Jezero Crater was also chosen based on the fact that we were able to get high resolution topographic data that allowed the game designers to model the local environment at a high level of resolution.

MM: What were your specific contributions?

SD: Most of the issues that I discussed with Fusion were related to the technical accuracy of the storyline and what the player would experience. These involved things like procedures that one would go through when preparing for a spacewalk, to how large a particular module of a habitat should be to sustain a 4-person crew for 500 days, to how the site around the base should be laid out to meet planetary protection requirements (to ensure that humans don’t contaminate Mars and vice-versa). This is a concern since the contamination of Mars with human microbial life would prevent us from ever finding out if indigenous Martian life had ever existed.

MM: Your Mars One feasibility study (which was inspiration for the VR game) concluded that technologies were needed that have not yet been developed. Does the game use future tech?

SD: The mission scenarios incorporate technologies either currently under development at NASA and at research institutes across the country, or being tested on the ISS.

There are still wide gaps between our current technological capabilities, and what is required to do even the 500-day conjunction class missions. Major technological challenges include safely landing large masses on the Martian surface, mitigating the harmful effects of space radiation on the crew during their mission (which can increase one's likelihood of developing cancer later on in life), and improving reliability and self-sustainability of life support and habitation systems.

MM: Has your own thinking about the feasibility of the Mars One mission - or about human colonization of Mars in general - changed in any way as a result of your work on Mars 2030?

SD: For me, Mars 2030 has acted as a means for me to disseminate some of the major results of my research group at MIT, and to connect this research with those across other institutes. So rather than changing my thinking, I’d say that the Mars 2030 project has helped me to frame and communicate the technical challenges of sending humans to Mars in a way that is more relatable to a mainstream audience.

Mars 2030 will be available later this year at no cost for the Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, and Samsung VR Gear via Valve’s Steam marketplace and on the Fusion website. It also will be available for iPhone and Android on iTunes and Google Play. A broadcast of the experience will also be available on Twitch TV.

NEWS FROM MADAME MARS

Madame Mars welcomes this semester's editing interns, Alex Kimble and Amielee Eastin.

Both Alex and Amielee are cinema majors at San Francisco State University. They are charged with fine-tuning last semester's edit and with developing the visual look/feel for the feature documentary, Madame Mars: Women and the Quest for Worlds Beyond.

On March 10, the Madame Mars team interviewed middle school students and met the Martians they'd created, on display at Riverview Middle School as part of the Bay Point Library's Mars Madness month.

Nia Brewer poses with her Martian Galactica, "a more curious type of Martian" who's not afraid of humans and would rather learn about them than destroy them. Her metallic covering protects her from harsh conditions on Mars, and she travels on her back to protect her babies nesting in sacs underneath. She's peaceful, unless threatened, and then watch out: she can project a nightmare from her big eyes right into your brain.

NEWS FROM FRIENDS OF MADAME MARS

From Ginny Golden:
Bay Point Library, part of the Contra Costa County Library system, has dubbed 2016 the Year of STEAM. The year-long celebration will focus on programs and education revolving around Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math. Library patrons of all ages will have the opportunity to engage in a variety of STEAM programs and activities that inspire creativity and innovation through education and entertainment.

From Heather Archuletta:
Heather Archuletta appeared in a Skype interview for FOX news in Houston on March 1, the day NASA astronaut Scott Kellly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Korneinko returned to Earth after spending nearly a year on the ISS.

She explained how their long-duration mission allowed scientists to study physiology in micro-gravity more closely than ever before, and how their data, both in itself and compared to ground analogs (like Scott's twin brother Mark Kelly) will be invaluable in our quest to keep astronauts healthy on future deep-space missions to places like Mars.

From the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP):

Brian Kruse, Lead Formal Educator with the ASP, presented Mars and the Human Imagination, a wide-ranging multi-media program covering both the scientific and mythological intrigue of Mars, on March 5 at the Women's Building, an event sponsored by the Bay Area Humanists.

From Mars One:

A new book, Mars One: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, edited by Mars One’s Chief Medical Officer Norbert Kraft, MD, and crew selection and training committee members James R. Kass, PhD, and Raye Kass, PhD, provides a behind-the-scenes look at the process and criteria used to choose candidates, plus predictions about what the first colonists will learn, and fascinating details about the lives these pioneers will experience on Mars.

From Doug Vakoch:
San Francisco has a new organization devoted not only to the search for life in the universe, but also how we can communicate with extra-terrestrial beings, Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence International (METI). Vakoch is president; in addition, the Board of Directors includes four women committed to space exploration: Dalia Rawson, Kim Binsted, Florence Raulin Cerceau, and Jill Stuart.

ARE YOU MAKING NEWS ABOUT MARS, SPACE EXPLORATION OR STEM/STEAM EDUCATION? SEND US YOUR NEWS SO WE CAN INCLUDE IT IN FUTURE ISSUES OF THIS NEWSLETTER!

MARS IN THE NEWS

MAVEN AT 4^th ANNUAL USA Science & Engineering Festival
Free Expo: Saturday April 16^th and Sunday April 17^th
Washington, D.C.

How did Mars become such an inhospitable place?

MAVEN Educator/Ambassador Phyllis Friello will demonstrate how Mars’ crustal magnetic fields interact with the solar wind to strip away the all-important atmosphere. MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) is NASA’s latest Mars orbiter.

AN ARGUMENT FOR NOT GOING TO MARS

In her Feb. 2 Washington Post article, Why a Mars Landing Could Be Terrible for Science, Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society argues that humans on Mars will contaminate the planet and confuse our search for life there:

"Ideally, the first 'human' exploration of Mars could be through direct control of landed robots from humans staying in Mars orbit. This way, we’d enjoy the advantages of the human brain and also the toughness and relative sterility of landed robots, advancing science as much as we can before we forever complicate the search for life on Mars."

MARS: THE SO-FAR SILENT PLANET

Plans to use microphones to record sounds on the Mars surface have been proposed, the devices have been built and even sent there, but we still have not heard anything from the red planet.

As described in a March 1 Motherboard
article, Carl Sagan's Dream of a Martian Microphone May finally Be Real, members of
NASA’s Mars 2020 SuperCam team will present their arguments for why a microphone should be included as part of the 2020 Mars Rover’s instrument payload at the upcoming 47th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, March 21–25 in The Woodlands, Texas.

MEANWHILE, ON MARS
HERE BE ROVERS: OLD/NEW MAP OF MARS

This "throwback" map of the Martian surface was hand-drawn by Eleanor Lutz, a Seattle-based science illustrator.

As reported in a March 1 Daily Mail article, this intricate map, created in the style of a Medieval cartographer, uses NASA data to enhance the design, including red circles that indicate landing sites for spacecraft.

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