Day 6 – Thursday, July 14

Day 6 lectures:

- Intro to Life Sciences, Gilles Clément (France)

o Very interesting! The videos of people flying around ISS (International Space Station) captivated the entire group.

o Radiation dose for a trip to Mars is 1000x exposure of the average human life

- Business Structure & Planning, Chris Sallaberger (Canada)

o Discussion about types of businesses, financial plans, and organizational structures (hierarchy and matrix as the extremes)

- The Sun, James Green (NASA HQ)

o Technical overview of sun spots, radiation, solar flares, and more

After our lectures the team projects were announced. Everybody ran out of the core lecture hall to see where they were placed.

I am on the Human-Robotic Cooperation Team – my first choice!

In our first TP (team project) meeting, we divided into 5 teams which were each assigned to read a different report on Mars from past SSP’s. Our team has to review a 700 page report from 1991. Interestingly, a lot of topics that we are thinking about right now (nuclear electric power for example) were discussed in that report. On one hand, it’s sad that we haven’t made progress in getting to Mars and it has been researched for a long time. I think in one talk, we heard that NASA proposed a Mars mission in its very early days. Our other assignment was to draft a mission statement and organization structure. Each of the 5 teams will present their homework next Friday and then hopefully we can agree on an org structure and get started on our project. There are 38 people on our team with different backgrounds and experience levels not to mention different languages. So I think organizing ourselves and figuring out how to make decisions efficiently will be the biggest challenge.

In our TP session, Hoffman presented an MIT student project in which humans would land on Mars’ moons Phobos / Deimos and from there, remotely operate robots on the Martian surface. This is one type of mission scenario we could explore or we could create something new. It will be fun to watch this project evolve!