To Mars and Back Again: Planetfest '21 - Mars Mind Meld

"The rovers are our proxies - their shadows on Mars are our shadows."

Bethany Ehlmann
Planetary Society president;
Professor of Planetary Science
and Associate Director, Keck Institute
for Space Studies, Caltech

Since its inception in 1980, the Planetary Society has staged ten Planetfests to commemorate significant milestones in space exploration, starting with the Voyager 2 flyby of Saturn in 1981, and then of Neptune in 1989, where Chuck Berry performed Johnny B. Goode in recognition of the song's inclusion on the gold record album attached to both of the Voyager probes.* Subsequent Planetfests have recognized events such as the unsuccessful Mars Polar landing in 1999, the Spirit rover's safe touchdown on Mars in 2004, and Curiousity's in 2012.

The most recent Planetfest, in honour of NASA's Perseverance Mars probe, took place this last weekend via Zoom. (I was a little surprised by the timing, in that if they'd waited another week, we could have been celebrating the probe's arrival on the red planet, but the organizers may well have decided that an unsuccessful landing would have put a damper on the event.)

The two-day celebration of Martian exploration featured an eclectic array of speakers, including an impressive selection of planetary scientists, engineers and NASA representatives; well-known science fiction authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Andy Weir; and Star Trek: Voyager actor and space exploration advocate Robert Picardo in conversation with producer, director and writer Brannon Braga, best known for his work on three television series and two movies in the Star Trek franchise.

This varied group of speakers, united by their shared passion and commitment to both the present and the future of space exploration, covered a wide range of fascinating, informative and insightful topics over the two days of the event.

After an introduction by Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye, Planetary Society president Bethany Ehlmann delivers the keynote speech for the weekend - Mars Mind Meld: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Mars. Her presentation provides a broad overview of Martian exploration, and looks at the questions that probes such as Perseverance will help to answer.

For Ehlmann, the most important question is: what happened to Mars that eliminated water and possibly life? Although there are only a few weeks of the Martian year when the environment allows liquid water to exist, Mars is covered with evidence of water - as Ehlmann points out, "the plumbing of Mars is exposed" - there is visible erosion of the surface by water, clay substrates, formations like those found around geothermal springs on Earth, and so on, all pointing to a time in the past when Mars may well have been more habitable than it is now. 

Provided all goes well on the 18th, Perseverance's extended mission on the surface of Mars will take it up the Midway delta that feeds into the Jezero Crater landing site**, allowing it to explore successive layers of Martian history as it proceeds up out of crater and moves a billion years further back in time.

In addition, the probe is not only an explorer, but a cacher, with the ability to store drilled samples from the various exposed strata for eventual return to Earth. It's hoped that these samples, each about the size of a piece of chalk, will allow scientists on Earth to answer questions about Martian climate, Martian change, and Martian life.  They're playing the long game on the process:  the current strategy for sample return involves a three year wait.

The eventual exploration of Mars by humans will immeasurably accelerate the process of scientific investigation, but until then, the robotic rovers act as proxies in our place - as Ehlmann eloquently puts it, "their shadows are our shadows".

- Sid

* It also included a needle, cartridge, and symbolic instructions on how to play the record - which, at this point in time, a lot of people on Earth would also need.

** I was charmed to see that she had a Post-It™ tab on the Martian globe in her office to indicate the Perseverance landing site.

 

Virtual Dreams III: Thanks anyway.

The Oculus Quest 2 operating system allows users to select from several virtual environments that acts as a backdrop for the headset's operating system and menu screens - not surprisingly, I've chosen the space station setting.

To my amusement, I recently learned that it’s possible to walk around in this virtual environment and explore the different rooms - provided that you do it in the middle of an empty football field or something similar, there doesn't seem to be any way to teleport from place to place.  My congratulations to Oculus on creating an explorable virtual environment that virtually no one can explore. 

- Sid

 

Virtual Dreams II: Living the Dream

My Oculus Quest 2 VR headset arrived today, and, as my wife would say, I kind of love it.

It's not perfect - I'm still fiddling with the Interpupilary Distance Settings on the eyepieces, I've been spoiled by 5K resolution on my iMac, and motion sickness is more of an immediate issue than I thought it would be, but for the most part, it does everything that I wanted - and expected - it to do beautifully.   

The packaging has the sort of clean molded look that Apple uses, and it's unexpected solid, which turns out to have a practical application in this case: after all, you have to keep the headset and controllers somewhere when they're not in use.  Oculus recommends that you charge the headset before your first use, but once you're charged and ready to go, setup is simple - the unit started up with no problems, the controllers paired up easily,  and I was able to seamlessly connect to our wireless router. 

There's one setup feature that reviewers cite as a possible deal breaker for the Quest 2:  you need to have a Facebook™ account.  I haven't used Facebook on a social basis for perhaps a decade, but I had to create a placeholder account at work to access our corporate page, so I was fine.  Users with more active accounts may want to adjust the privacy settings once they have the headset running.

The unit has a number of features intended to minimize the environmental hazards of VR, such as mapping your surroundings on the headset’s external cameras so that you don't break your favourite lamp - or your 60 inch TV set - while engaged in furious virtual lightsaber combat, and a highly useful option where double-tapping on the headset frame switches your view to the external camera sensors, which allows you to re-orient yourself in your space - not to mention find your controllers when starting up.

The gaming library isn’t huge, but it’s surprisingly affordable. PC games generally weigh in at $50-60 and up, whereas the Oculus games seem to uniformly fall into the $20-30 CAD range. There are also some free downloads and demos, which happily includes the ISS experience that captured my imagination in New York, and the Space Pirate Trainer demo, a short introduction to a simple futuristic two-gun arcade shooter that was unexpectedly fun, and went right onto the shopping list. 

Along with the full version of Space Pirate Trainer, the store features a Walking Dead first person shooter/survival game set in New Orleans, the well-reviewed Red Matter puzzle solving game, and Star Wars games such as a three-part Darth Vader series, Vader Immortal, and Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge, a semi-open world game set in the world of Galaxy’s Edge at Disney World and Disneyland. I chose Tales from the Galaxy's Edge as my inaugural purchase, and the process was simple and the download wait was negligible. 

Tales wisely doesn't attempt to provide photorealistic resolution, but the 3D illusion is astonishing, especially in the views from the orbiting cargo hauler.  The controllers show as gauntlets equipped with different control options, and when you look down, you discover that you're wearing an vest/tool belt combination, with holsters and loops for tools, weapons and drones, along with a storage pouch.  I'm amused to discover that the bar which acts as a sort of home base on Batuu overlooks the central plaza in Black Spire Outpost. (Been there, done that, and I have the T-shirt - actually, two t-shirts, come to think of it.)

In the interests of fair franchise representation, there’s also a Star Trek Bridge Crew game, but it doesn’t seem to have the same range of play and action as the Star Wars games.  On the other hand, given that motion sickness due to perceived movement is something of an issue, maybe buying a game where you sit still in a nice chair on the bridge of the USS Enterprise is a smarter idea than I think it is.

- Sid

 

* The original sold for $399 USD, so that Canadian price is an estimate.  The current price is surprisingly reasonable, given that high end models like the Valve Index top out at almost two grand.