Can You Help NASA Build A Mars Sim in VR?

No matter your project or field of endeavor, simulation is a useful tool for finding out what you don’t know. In many cases, problems or issues aren’t obvious until you try and do something. Where doing that thing is expensive or difficult, a simulation can be a low-stakes way to find out some problems without huge costs or undue risks.


Going to Mars is about as difficult and expensive as it gets. Thus, it’s unsurprising that NASA relies on simulations in planning its missions to the Red Planet. Now, the space agency is working to create a Mars sim in VR for training and assessment purposes. The best part is that you can help!



Why Simulate Mars?


Sunset on Mars, as captured by NASA’s Spirit rover in 2005. Even simple things like night and day are different on Mars compared to Earth, and could present complications to NASA’s operations. Simulation will help find that out ahead of time. Credit: NASA, public domain

When it comes to things like rocket performance and calculating satellite trajectories, NASA is pretty well sorted when it comes to simulations. It’s got crack teams of engineers and scientists that have spent decades improving these tools for the agency.


However, when it comes to putting astronauts on the surface of Mars, NASA doesn’t really have a whole lot to go on. In future, astronauts could land on the planet, and be charged with a variety of tasks in the Martian environment. These could be as diverse as exploring on foot or on motorized conv ..

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