Creating and Exploring a Virtual Environment

Note: this Activity refers back to skills practiced in all those which have preceded it. It functions, therefore, as a practical assessment of students' mastery of many of the previous Objectives.

Background/Rationale

One strategy for mapping and exploring large parts of Mars is MESUR (the Mars Environment Survey). The objective of MESUR is to establish a global network of stations on the surface of Mars for collecting data. There will be 16 stations capable of documenting the planet's meteorology, internal seismic activity and local surface properties. Using this data, exobiologists expect to get a clearer idea of the possibility of Mars having once sustained life.

In this activity, your students will use their previously learned skills to make their own environmental survey using a method similar to the MESUR strategy.

Objectives

Vocabulary

Materials

Optional:

Preparation

Group students into 6 teams. Prepare the "Alien Planet" or landscape to be mapped. This can be out-of-doors, or in the case of winter weather and if space permits indoors, but then the cardboard boxes will be needed.

An area with some elevation changes (hill, gully) is ideal for this activity, however you can use a flat area and build up a landform with cardboard boxes (a "mountain range" running through parts of each of the six sections works well)

Use yarn and popsicle sticks to outline a 12 m. x 8 m. "transect" (or grid by which to define each separate observation, just as the NSF researchers have been using over the years in McMurdo Sound); mark the 1 m squares with string. Assign each team a separate section to map.

(Note: if you have an real landform to work with, set down yarn or rope of another color indicating "sea level" or 0 m. elevation.) Place a chair for the "Brain" or "Human Operator" of each team at a remote location (a place where they cannot easily observe the area. If as in Activity 1 you are using optical fiber, it can carry coded commands and responses from site to site. If not, experiment with sending using flashlights and mirrors from the area being surveyed to the Control site. (You may need to substitute student runners for this data transmission system if sunlight interferes with seeing the light flashes). You will need two pieces of 4 x 4 grid paper (one for the Brain and one for the Robot Explorer), and the data transmission system of your choice, for each team.

Activity 5 A: Mapping

  1. Explain that the class teams will be simulating the mapping and exploration of a distant site. They will collect enough data to enable them to build a "virtual environment", like the one they made from the shoe box landform. This means that information about elevation and color are to be added to the previous mapping methods.
  2. Give them time to work out commands, codes and methods they will use to communicate the necessary information. (They may wish to discuss what they saw Dale Andersen and fellow researchers doing in Video 1, and how Butler Hine and colleagues created a landscape from this work in Video 2.) Remember, they will need to code for which square they are observing, the height of that square and other factors they decide are significant.
  3. Have the Human ROV's transmit their data back to base, as in Activity 1, where it is recorded on a 4 x 4 sheet of paper.

Activity 5 B: Creating a Virtual Environment

  1. Each team mapped 1/6 of the landform, each using a 4 x 4 grid. Now it is time to put the information together (using all 6 grids) to make a virtual environment which represents all the landform. Explain that this was done with a computer in the "LIVE FROM OTHER WORLDS" programs but that a scale model of cardboard, wood, clay, etc. will serve the same purpose in this activity.
  2. Give each team a 1' x 1' piece of plywood or flat cardboard and model building supplies (newspaper and clay or straws and paper mache). Have the teams translate their data into a three dimensional model of the landform, as done in Activity 4. Suggest a scale of 4 meters =1 foot. Paint the model when done.

Activity 5 C: Searching for Life Preparation

  1. Check your landform (the real space that has been explored) to be sure it is intact and make repairs needed. Put a playing card face down in each 1 m square section of the transect. Don't let the students see you putting the aces in the low areas or stream beds. (These represent fossilized life forms.) The other cards can be distributed at random. Have your student teams build a robotic arm using the methods as in Activity 2. Make a new copy of the 4 x 4 sheet of paper for each team.

Searching For Life Activity

  1. Put all the pieces of the map together and examine it as a class. Assuming it represents part of a Martian or other planetary environment, and you can only turn over 8 cards, where would you search for life? Explain that the teams will have a chance to go back to the landform with a TROV that has a robotic arm. They will have an opportunity to interact with the environment, looking under rocks, searching for the aces which represent evidence of life.
  2. Have the teams write out a program of commands for the TROV to follow when it reaches the landform, as in Activities 2 and 3. The program needs to include directions to the TROV and the arm. In this part of the search the TROV will run its program, use the arm to turn "rocks" over, and return data about what it finds to the remote "Human Operator", using pre-arranged codes as before. This information is recorded on the 4 x 4 paper.
  3. Gather the student teams around the "virtual environment" and have them place colored pins in the map to show what they found in each of the 8 squares they searched. Green indicates "life", while red shows "no life". Are there any patterns? What can you surmise about life in that region based on the data collected?

Wrap Up

Have students write up a proposal for a return mission to the landform. Given a second chance to search for life, how and where would they look?

Follow Up Discussion/Journal Entry

Evaluate with your students how many things learned in previous lessons "came together" in this activity.

How much would they have learned if their spacecraft were a Lander that could only search the transect square in which it first set down?

Options

Have students research Rover designs and the more exotic plans for Mars' Balloons discussed in the Articles available online. Suggest some of them check out the Road and Track Magazine "review" of JPL's Rocky IV micro rover, which (in a tongue-in-cheek way) rates it as if it were a sophisticated but tiny dune buggy.

Pulling together information about Mars and its surface, found both in the programs and in the Backgrounder contained in this Guide, have students "Design a Rover." Remind them of the different strategies adopted by Russian and American teams. Does it make more sense to go "large" or "small"? What kind of wheels chassis camera system manipulator arm would they choose? And why? Suggest they try to get online and review materials available on Internet from CONTEXT PRODUCTIONS, whose interactive DESIGN-A- ROVER project may be seen in the National Air and Space Museum.

Follow Creating and Exploring a Virtual Environment, with an assortment of Mars Link topography lessons.(link here)

This lesson adapted from the "Life From... Other Worlds" Teacher's guide.

November 1993 GHSP/INNERSPACE FOUNDATION
THE "LIVE FROM... OTHER WORLDS" PROJECT
PROJECT DIRECTOR & EXECUTIVE PRODUCER Geoffrey Haines-Stiles