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By Jørgen Bøegh - July 2000
Jørgen Bøegh reports on the Virtual Control Room being developed in the IST project ASH (Access to Scientific Space Heritage). The Virtual Control Room will provide an exciting environment for young students to learn about space and astronomy by carrying out a simulated space mission built around the European Space Agency Rosetta mission to the comet Wirtanen.
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How did life come to Earth? Maybe Earth provided the right conditions for life to start spontaneously? Or maybe life came from somewhere else in the universe? We don’t know, but today most scientists believe that Earth is not the only planet in the universe where life exists. Scientists also think that there are links between the different ‘civilizations’. In other words, life is able to travel through the universe.
How can this be possible? A likely answer is that comets could be the carriers of life’s building blocks. If we are looking for traces of life outside the Earth the comets are therefore good places to look.
The ASH project will build a Virtual Control Room that makes it possible for school classes to plan and carry out virtual missions to a comet to look for traces of life. The students will play the roles of scientists, engineers, mission control managers etc., and they will experience the excitement of making new discoveries.
The inspiration for the Virtual Control Room comes from the Mission Control Center in Houston, which became famous in the sixties with the Apollo missions to the Moon. In these days people were fascinated with science and technology.
Much has changed since then. People are now much less concerned with technology. This also influences the young generation and can be seen by the serious lack of skilled engineers in Europe.
One of the aims of the ASH project is to provide a teaching environment that will fascinate school children and make them interested in becoming engineers or scientists.
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| Figure 1: View of the ASH Virtual Control Room |
The Virtual Control Room will look somewhat similar to a real mission control center. There will be different work places where specific mission tasks can be controlled and managed. For pedagogical reasons these work places are grouped in islands. This makes the Virtual Control Room concept flexible. It will be possible to assign different responsibilities to the different islands or all islands can be assigned the same task and working in parallel. It will be easy to add more islands depending on the number of students to be accommodated for each mission. A big screen in front of the islands will provide a common view for all students as well as serving as a working space for special experiments.
Groups of students must work together in their search for traces of life on a comet. The students must identify the comet and calculate its orbit, select a set of experiments, calculate the optimal orbit of the spacecraft, launch the mission, travel through space to reach the comet, find a good landing spot, carry out the planned experiments, and finally draw the conclusions from their experiments: Are there any traces of life on the comet?
The Virtual Control Room will be based on the following principles:
The inspiration of the mission to be implemented in the ASH project comes from the ESA mission Rosetta. The Rosetta mission will be launched on 21 January 2003. The spacecraft will make a nearly ten years roundabout before it reaches its target. On its way it will pass the asteroids Otawara and Siwa. It will pass Mars in August 2005, come back to Earth in 2005 and 2007, and finally reach the comet Wirtanen in 2011. This complicated orbit takes advantage of the gravity of Earth and Mars to give the spacecraft the necessary energy to reach the comet.
The Rosetta mission is very interesting from a teaching perspective. It is an exciting mission searching for traces of life, it includes many facets of space exploration and astronomy, and it can illustrate topics from mathematics, physics, biology, geology and so on. The concepts of time and space will be covered and an understanding of life and its building blocks is fundamental.
Furthermore, the Rosetta mission is a European mission, thereby emphasizing the European achievements in space science and astronomy. Hence, the ASH project aims to establish close links to both ESA and ESO.
The ASH project consortium has the expertise needed for developing the Virtual Control Room. Three partners, EuroPlanetarium, Royal Observatory, and Tycho Brahe Planetarium are responsible for planning and developing the mission. Three other partners, DELTA Danish Electronics, Light & Acoustics (project coordinator), Space Application Services, and the Technical University Vienna will design and implement the distributed system architecture, simulation models and advanced 3D user interface of the Virtual Control Room.
The ASH project started on 1 January 2000 and will run for two years. The project aims to involve all interested parties by organizing a series of user workshops. The first user workshop took place in May. This workshop focused on user requirements. The second user workshop is scheduled for the beginning of 2001. This workshop will focus on feedback to the system design and pedagogical aspects of the mission. Anybody interested in participating should contact a project representative in order to get an invitation.
The ASH project provides a new approach to increasing students awareness and appreciation about space and astronomy. The Virtual Control Room offers an exciting environment for learning about space by conducting a simulated mission to a comet searching for traces of life. The application of multimedia technology gives a feeling of realism and heightens the intensity of the experience. The Rosetta mission is targeted at high school level students but the Virtual Control Room concept could be used in many other applications.
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Jørgen Bøegh
DELTA Danish Electronics
Light &
Acoustics
Venlighedsvej 4, DK-2970 Hørsholm, Denmark
jb@delta.dk
<http://www.delta.dk>
Phone: +45 45 86 77 22
Jørgen Bøegh is employed at DELTA. He is the project manager of the ASH project. Previously he was responsible for the development of a collaborative virtual educational environment as part of the ACTS project Prospect. He has participated in and managed several other research projects. He is the head of the Danish delegation to ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7. He is the author of several papers and a book on object oriented software development.
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For citation purposes:
Bøegh, J. "The ASH project: A Virtual Control Room",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/ash/>
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