Update on an Analog Rover Exploration Mission for Education and Outreach
Abstract
The analog rover exploration mission is designed as an outreach program to educate high school and undergraduate students on basic mission control operations. By simulating a rover on another planet, participants must complete science goals through remote management over the course of several sessions. As of June 2018, three iterations of this program have been completed. In our fourth trial for the Ontario Science Centre, we've made significant edits to allow flexible attendance between sessions. If successful, this program will be adaptable to different outreach scenarios. In the previous three runs, participants were given different mission operation roles with specific responsibilities and meetings to attend. Roles included Science Planners (planning observations and drives), Rover Engineers (maintenance of instrument health) and Mission Lead (oversees entire mission). Introducing varying roles was thought to bring more discussion into the program, however, this was not the case. In every run, participants assumed more than one role to skip discussion between others. To address this, participants will be given the same role (Science Planners) while volunteers will be leadership roles. Another change in our program includes limiting the rover's traverse path. Originally, participants would choose where to drive indicating distance and azimuthal angle. Instead, we created our own traverse path with set stop locations where participants will make the decision whether or not to include a drive. An update will be provided after our fourth run to include any discussion and present lessons learned from this new style. By running this event at the Ontario Science Centre, we hope to gain knowledge on how to adapt this program for different scenarios and demographics.
- Publication:
-
AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #50
- Pub Date:
- October 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018DPS....5020205C