Let’s drive across country, Dad said. It will be fun, Dad said. Two days in you’re squirming in your seat and your siblings are driving you nuts. A week-long road trip is bad enough, but imagine taking a trip for 18 months. That’s how long a round-trip mission to Mars could take. The challenge of making such a mission succeed isn’t just about engineering, it’s also about psychology.

To study the psychological challenges of such a mission, NASA has begun an isolation study with a crew of 6 who will spend a year in a dome not 12 meters wide. If that isn’t bad enough, the team will have no fresh food and no fresh air. If they want to step outside for a bit to calm down, they’ll have to do it in a space suit. Nothing like a bit of stir crazy in the name of science.

From earlier experiments we know conflicts will arise. The purpose of the study is not to spend a year without conflicts, but rather to study what causes them and how they can best be resolved. What we learn with the study will play a vital role in the success of a future Mars mission. We already know how to build spacecraft capable of traveling to Mars, and we know how to build habitats in space and in remote regions like Antarctica.

But the road trip to Mars is very long, and there aren’t any rest areas along the way.

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In my introductory physics courses, I occasionally implement what I call “high stakes labs.” Take a set of measurements for a devices such as a ball launcher, use those results and your knowledge of physics to predict an outcome (such as where the ball will land) and then test your prediction. The catch is that the grade for the lab depends upon the accuracy of your prediction. It is stressful and challenging, but it demonstrates a common aspect of science and engineering. You can’t simply look up the answer in the book. You have to test your ideas in the real world.

In terms of high stakes labs, the highest of stakes was likely the early manned space program. Not only does everything from the propulsion system to life support need to function correctly, the rocket needs to land in the correct location.  Calculating trajectories is not easy, as anyone who has played Kerbal Space knows.  It involves complex mathematics such as analytic geometry, and it absolutely needs to be correct.

When NASA prepared to launch Alan Shepard as the first American in space, they used a computer to calculate his capsule’s trajectory. Her name was Katherine Johnson. Johnson’s forte was analytic geometry, and she was very, very good at it.  She began her work as part of a pool of “computers” that worked through the complex mathematics necessary for orbital predictions. Her skill as a mathematician was so impressive that when NASA first began using electronic computers to calculate trajectories, Johnson was asked to verify the results.

Johnson worked for NASA’s Langley Research Center for more than three decades, co-authored 26 papers, and ensured that American astronauts reached their destination. She also happened to be a black woman in a field dominated by white men, which was a whole other kind of high stakes lab.

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You may have heard about NASA’s budget woes and how that impacts most of their outreach programs.  It means we not only lose programs such as the annual +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory open house and +CosmoQuest, but also programs such as the one I worked with this past weekend.  It is a project called NASA Science and Technology on the Family Calendar.It is a collaboration between +NASA, +Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Rochester Museum and Science Center where kids get to develop demonstrations and displays for their science center.  It’s a great example of bottom up (rather than top down) science outreach.  Science driven by the questions and interests of kids themselves, rather than being dictated by teachers and scientists.The overall topic for this weekend’s project was “Earth From Space”.  So teams looked at environmental changes, natural disasters, remote imaging and other topics related to space-based observations of Earth.  One team wanted to release a weather balloon to take pictures from space.  We didn’t have the budget for a released balloon, but we could do a tethered one.  As you can see, they got some pretty cool pictures of downtown Rochester.This particular project wasn’t a huge grant, but there are hundreds like it across the country, and they are all at risk with the budget cuts.  Most kids don’t live near JPL, and losing the annual open house won’t mean much to them.  But children all over the country will lose opportunities such as this one due to current cut backs.Hopefully we can change that trend.

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