April 1 - 3: Contact - Domain Hotel, Sunnyvale
April 8 - 10: Death Valley Marsfest 2016 (Celestial Centennial)
April 16: Mark West Elementary School Science Fair, Santa Rosa
May 20 - 22: Maker Faire
Blogging the Mars Society / NASA Ames Science Rover Project
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Posted by BD at 12:30 PM 0 comments
The NorCal Mars Society chapter attended the 2012 Maker Faire in San Mateo and set up an exhibit booth for the rover project. The faire was bustling with activity this year and there were lots of people stopping by our booth to discuss our rovers and our chapter.
Our Phoenix rover, despite some technical difficulties due to WiFi interference, was operational and we gave visitors to our booth the opportunity to drive it around the nearby walkway. We had a nearly constant line of kids waiting for their chance to drive the rover.
Posted by Scott at 10:55 AM 0 comments
Members of the NorCal Chapter attended for the second time in a row the Maker Faire event in San Mateo, California. Its an event which always brings together a large number of technology and tinkering enthusiasts and seasoned professionals who share a passion for making things. We had a presence together with our NASA Ames colleagues. The rover display attracted many visitors, and initiated a number of conversations revolving around rover hardware and software and the exploration of Mars, future missions on it, and the prospects of one day landing a human mission and building a settlement. For now, we fill our time in exploring different scenarios, mission configurations and software revision on Earth based Mars analogs.
Our chapter member Jon Cox gives a brief overview of the chapter and our current work in the video shot at the Maker Faire.
Posted by BD at 9:59 PM 0 comments
NorCal Mars Society members Jon Cox and Scott Davis presented the Sandstorm rover at Meyerholz Elementary School in San Jose on October 5th, 2011. Scott gave a presentation to an audience of third and fifth-grade students about the planet Mars and how astronauts may someday use robot rovers to assist them in exploring it. The students had been studying the solar system and were very excited about Mars. Sandstorm then drove out and greeted the students. The rover's camera view was projected on the screen for the students to see. Miss Peng's third-grade class was able to stay after the presentation and each student got a chance to operate the rover. Special thanks to Sylvia Leong for inviting us and helping organize the presentation.
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Members of the NorCal MS Chapter (Jon Cox, Scott Davis, Boris Debic) took part in the Science Alliance Showcase event at the Warm Springs elementary School in Freemont. It was a full day event with several in-class presentations and rover demonstrations finishing off with a "Why go to Mars?" (And why study engineering and science) lecture for students at the end of the day. After getting the rovers back with fresh data from the MDRS deployment in the Utah desert it was a fitting followup in our outreach activites program. Here's in Clyde Mann's own words:
"Our students had the opportunity to hear about and see the Norcal Mars Rover Project present throughout the day. The presentation was to over 800 students, cluminating in a big school assembly at the end of the day. I was fortunate to see parts of the final presentation. It was hot and sweaty in our multi-purpose room, yet Boris Debic singlehandedly kept the students illuminated and attentive by his fantastic sense of humor, and the idea that we are explorers and will always look for new frontiers. Celebrities, politicians (not statesmen), fortune 500 CEO’s, and Venture Capitalists don’t move me. What you brought to the students was truly inspiring. All I can say is that the next day, students with their eyes bulging out in excitement, could not stop talking about the presentation and loved the rovers."
Posted by BD at 2:06 PM 0 comments
The collaboration is evident at NASA/Ames Research Center in Mountain View. Ames is carrying out leading-edge research in high-performance computing, networking, advanced number-crunching software, visual displays, 3-D graphics and artificial intelligence. Work is also under way on tele-operations - linking the human touch to the work of a robot far off Earth - as well as telepresence that allows a person to feel as if he or she is actually present in a different place or time.
Projects like these have the potential to create "disruptive technologies" benefiting humankind. The efforts support NASA's aeronautical and space agenda, but they also have the potential to be spun off into commercial technologies.
-- Gene Kranz