A Successful Rover Exploration Challenge

In late July, PVL's "Rover Exploration Challenge*" came to the Ontario Science Center. There we shared a little bit of what we do in planetary space exploration with 400 members of the public over two days. Charissa (center of photograph), along with Christina, worked tirelessly to ensure the success of this event and we're already talking about repeating it next year! Look for our DPS abstract in a few weeks time which will describe what we learned from all of you in the course of designing and carrying out this simulation. And on a timely note, congrats to Charissa on the successful defense of her MSc thesis. I have updated her tag in this article accordingly.

By Charissa Campbell

Another day, another successful run of our outreach program for rover operations. With now four completed runs, we can successfully say that we have explored multiple styles of outreach. Our most recent run in late July (see Christina’s blog post: http://york-pvl.blogspot.com/2018/07/rover-exploration-challenge-at-ontario.html) was labelled the Rover Exploration Challenge and was significantly different from previous runs. Located at the Ontario Science Centre, participants were visitors that were free to drop into the program during the start of every iteration or planning day. Multiple planning days were carried out, building off the previous iteration. This allowed multiple measurements to be taken throughout the rover’s traverse path. Both Saturday and Sunday’s runs had the same traverse path, but measurements differed based on the participants planning. 

Several changes were made between previous Rover Day runs. One significant change was allowing for flexible participant attendance. Running a program at the Science Centre must be effective for a flow of visitors throughout the day. For previous runs, we had a set number of participants which simplified assigning roles. For this run we accommodated the changing influx of participants between sessions by having the participants be assigned identical roles (Science Planners). This modification helped with certain issues such as not having enough participants to cover a specific role, such as Rover Engineer. Instead, those leadership-type roles were assigned to members within our research group who helped volunteer those days. This also allowed for easier relay of information to participants because of the more varied demographics associated with the Science Centre. Families are most common which required a change in tactics as previous runs dealt with high school level or higher. To combat this, we created a user-friendly Activity Dictionary (shown below) that gives happy/sad faces to explain the science. Therefore, if the measurement returned from the rover was in the happy face zone, that value is ideal for life to exist on that planet. 

 

Another change made to this program was the traverse path of the rover, that was previously planned by the participants. This involved planning both when and where to drive and relied on the volunteers to carry out the drive and corresponding activities for that stop. Since we don’t have our own personalized rover, activities and drives planned by participants were carried out by a volunteer, relaying information back to the program inside. This required an extra 30 minutes for each iteration for the rover volunteer to carry out those activities. Instead, we made the path fixed and took all the needed measurements beforehand. This allowed more time during the day to fit in more iterations of our program with participants seeing their results before the next iteration. After using a satellite image to create a traverse path consisting of 7 stops, colleagues and I went to the Science Centre on a previous day and took all the needed measurements/images needed at each traverse stop. Participants were able to take more than one measurement with an instrument in each plan, so a total of three measurements for each instrument were taken at each stop. Since we are simulating a rover on another planet, one of my volunteers (shout-out to Michael Tabascio) created a script mimicking the relay of information to/from the rover. Not only did it distract from the fact that we didn’t have a rover, but it allowed participants to view computer programming which is an important aspect of science today.

One of the best additions to our program was the Wheel-of-Error. Courtesy of the Science Centre, a customizable Wheel-of-Fortune was created to simulate potential errors that can occur in planetary missions. In previous runs, we would account for this by personally choosing what instrument would break or if a drive was to fail. However, having a Wheel-of-Error allowed the participants to spin the wheel and decide the fate of their plan. As shown below, the Wheel-of-Error is cut into 10 slices with specific consequences for landing on that slice. For example, there were three Science Groups (Water, Atmosphere and Surface Habitability) that had their own science goals while exploring the planet. If the wheel lands on the “Water fault” slice, that Science Group would lose a random observation they planned. Otherwise, the rover could experience a drive fault, or the team could be lucky and not receive any faults (Everything is go). The last, and most stressful, is the “Full fault” which means the entire plan is lost. We did have some close calls, but luckily the Mission Manager (myself) was able to catch (literally!) any full faults before they occurred. The addition of the Wheel-of-Error proved itself valuable when engaging with the audience and added the extra element of chance.  

This new style proved successful after positive feedback from both participants and Ontario Science Centre staff members that helped with the program. After spending several hours putting together these programs, it is satisfying to find one that worked so well for both participants and volunteers. Thank you to all my volunteers who helped put together this run and Rachel Ward-Maxwell at the Ontario Science Centre for giving us the perfect location for this program. For the 50^th Division of Planetary Science (DPS) meeting in October 2018, I will be presenting outreach results from this run, including a comparison with previous runs. I look forward to showing off our unique outreach program and how it can be modified for different settings such as a private session or at a Science Centre.

*Note: this activity is made possible by a grant from the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science