Lagarde_2002abstr

 

 

PROPOSED COMMUNICATION SOFTWARE TO

RESEARCH COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES BETWEEN MARS AND EARTH

 

Jean Lagarde† JimOliver‡

†Mr. Lagarde is a Mars Society volunteer living in California. jlagarde@bigfoot.com

‡Mr. Oliver is a Mars Society volunteer living in Colorado. jimoliver@dessica.com

 

 

The software described in this paper is an attempt at providing an analog integrated mission database and interplanetary communication system to be used in the operation of the Mars Analog Research Stations set up by The Mars Society. The system is meant to store, organize and transmit both mission data and meta-data (data about the mission for the purpose of analog research). The transmittal capabilities of the system are primarily meant for communication between the Mars crew and Earth-based Mission Support, but it could be used for mission communication with other parties as well. Examples of the types of data that could be handled by the system are daily reports, technical support requests, various consumable logs, samples and other scientific databases, waypoints, data processing support requests, and crew comments (critiques) about the mission. The system was developed as a volunteer effort. It is implemented in the Zope application server, with most of the code written in the Python scripting language. The software status is considered early beta. The focus of this paper is not on the implementation details of the software, but on its functionality and its potential usefulness to the Mars analog research program.