Space Quest: The Game

Background

Space is endlessly fascinating, but there are many challenges of space exploration that must be overcome. The tremendous distances, lack of navigational aids, difficulties of launch and landing, limited and delayed communications, cosmic ray environment, and very high costs of changing speed and direction are just a few of the many obstacles to be overcome. These obstacles, however, offer unique and compelling examples to teach fundamental concepts in science and engineering in a way that can be inspiring and entertaining. Space exploration pushes the boundaries of our technological capabilities, and it offers unique insights into society’s history of exploration as much as it may lay the path to our future.

Objectives

Your challenge is to help people understand more complex aspects of space exploration using a game or puzzle format as an educational tool. The format can be anything from trading cards to a board game, to a printable puzzle, to a video game, to an on-line interactive, to a digital notebook lesson plan with quantitative or qualitative approaches.

Potential Considerations

• Steps to take:
• Set a style of game play
• Create a goal for your mission(s)
• Choose a destination to explore
• Choose a mission architecture and set the details
• Explore!
• What will your goals be?
  • Will you search for life? Study the history of the solar system? Explore uncharted terrain to make maps – with robotic or human explorers? Mine for resources, such as water that could be used to make fuel? Or will you use space as a laboratory, to study how physics and chemistry work at pressures and temperatures so different from those on Earth?
• Destinations:
  • Our solar system is huge. Do not limit your thinking. Apart from the big planets, there are multiple destinations in the different asteroid groups, Trans Neptunian Objects and even further out in the scattered disk and Oort cloud. Or what about exoplanets? Or extra-solar visitors to our system such as Oumuamua? Just consider what it would take to get there.
    • The Giant planets (such as Jupiter and Saturn) are made predominantly of gas and have strong magnetic fields.
    • The terrestrial planets (like Mercury and Mars) and many asteroids are made mostly of rocks and metals.
    • The icy bodies (such as Pluto, comets, and Kuiper belt objects) are made of frozen ices such as nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water – which can be gasses at Earth’s temperature, but freeze into ice as they get further from the Sun.
  • And don’t limit your thinking to just our solar system! Scientists are starting to think of ways of traveling beyond interstellar space to the next solar systems containing the exoplanets we can detect from earth. You too can think about how you might reach them.
• Mission type: Will you send humans or robots?
  • If you send humans, what other aspects of your mission will you need to consider? Are you exploring planetary surfaces, returning samples of asteroids and comets, or just voyaging to the most distant parts of our solar system or others?
  • Human missions allow more interaction. But they are higher-risk, slower, larger, and more expensive.
• Duration and Trajectory
  • How long will it take to get there? What is the route? Will the mission need gravity assists or aerobraking? Do those options afford opportunities to explore multiple destinations?
  • If your spacecraft is large, you’ll either have to use a massive rocket, or plan to have several gravity assists to ‘wind up’ enough velocity to get to a distant destination before many years have passed!
• Launch vehicle, Spacecraft and Lander
  • What kind of rocket will you need to get off Earth? Will your spacecraft have its own propulsion too? How fast do you need to go? How will you slow down once you get to your destination?
  • Most spacecraft today launch from the Earth’s surface. But in the future, some might launch from low-earth-orbit, or from the Moon, in order to put a larger payload into space. For small payloads, some inexpensive rockets are launched from airplanes. And for the smallest payloads, dozens or even hundreds of Cubesats can be launched at once.
• Communications
  • How will you communicate with your spacecraft? Will there be a delay? How will the data or even samples get back to Earth?
  • Many spacecraft radio their images and measurements back to Earth, and never have to return. If you’re picking up samples, you’ll have to choose: Do you bring a chemistry lab with you and radio back the results, or do you reverse course and bring samples back to Earth to be analyzed? Labs on Earth are more capable – but a return trip can take years, and a safe landing is not guaranteed!
• Relationships to past missions
  • Voyagers and New Horizons are out well past Pluto! There are rovers and other craft on Mars and Venus and orbiting them.
  • Some spacecraft complement each other by helping to navigate, or to transmit data. Others work together by viewing the same targets from a different angle, different wavelength, or different time. And others go by themselves, exploring a new region of space that has never been studied close-up.
• How will you deal with risks?
  • What if your ship is hit by asteroids? Or cosmic rays wreck your electronics? Or your antenna doesn't deploy? Or your solar panel gets covered in dust? Or a software bug you never tested throws the mission off course? All of these things can really happen!
• Wildcard ideas
  • What happens if you find life? What if you find something totally different than what you expected? What if the mission goes off course, and risks colliding with another one — or impacting into a sensitive planetary landscape?

Gameplay

• Consider everything from a card game puzzle where pieces need to be tiled through to coded approaches in any open format or digital notebook.
• You could give each player a fixed amount of money and have them plan a mission.
• Or you could take turns, and at each step, move your mission one step further to completion.
• Or you could work together, pooling resources to reduce risk and explore more.
• Potential keywords you can search: Delta-v, Mars cycler orbits

For data and resources related to this challenge, refer to the Resources tab at the top of the page. More resources may be added before the hackathon begins.

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