August 5th marked the 2nd anniversary on Curiosity’s landing on Mars. The “landiversary”, as NASA dubbed the occasion, passed in something of a subdued manner in many respects, featuring a re-run of the August 2012 video reviewing the MSL’s arrival on Mars. Reviews of the mission from the perspective of two years on from that remarkable lading didn’t start-up until the days after the anniversary, with videos and lectures from members of the mission team.
One of the films which did appear, directly out of Caltech, rather than NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (which is located on Caltech’s Pasadena, California, campus), is Our Curiosity, a 6-minute celebration of Curiosity’s mission, and humanity’s drive to explore, to seek, to learn, and to understand, narrated by Felicia Day and the superb Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
August 5th also marked my last MSL report, when Curiosity was some 3 kilometres from the lower slopes of “Mount Sharp”, the huge mound at the centre of Gale Crater, and the rover’s primary target for exploration. At that time, the rover had started to cross a region of chaotic terrain, marked by a rocky plateau cut by a series of sandy-bottomed valleys. The plateau itself proved to be littered with sharp-edges rocks and stones which had already caused some increase in the wear and tear being suffered by the rover’s wheels – albeit not as much as mission engineers had feared – by the time Curiosity had reached the edge of the nearest of the shallow valleys, which had been dubbed “Hidden Valley”.
The plan had been to use the valleys, where the sand would be less wearing on the rover’s aluminium wheels, to reach an exposed area of bedrook designated the “Pahrump Hills”, where Curiosity would engage in further rock sampling work prior to it continuing on to the “Murray Buttes”, the entry point for its ascent up the lower slopes of “Mount Sharp”.
However, rather than drive the one-tonne rover straight through the middle of the valley, where there are numerous dunes of potentially soft, wind-blown sand which might cause some difficulty traversing, the idea had been for Curiosity to skirt along the edge of the valley, where it was hoped the sand would be firmer and make for a better driving surface. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case; as the rover proceeded along “Hidden Valley” it exhibited far more signs of wheel slippage than had been anticipated, giving rise to fears that it might get bogged-down in the sand were it to continue.
The sands of Mars: an image from Curiosity’s black and white Navcam system captured on August 4th, showing the loose sands the rover was traversing as it continued into “Hidden Valley” (click for full size)
As a result, the rover reversed course, driving back out of the valley. In doing so, it crossed the rocky “ramp” it had used to originally enter the valley, and one of its wheels cracked the slab-like rock’s surface, revealing bright material within, possibly from mineral veins. The rock, dubbed “Bonanza King” showed similar signs of origin as “Pahrump Hills”, so a decision was made to examine it as a possible substitute drilling site.
“Geologically speaking, we can tie the Bonanza King rocks to those at “Pahrump Hills”. Studying them here will give us a head start in understanding how they fit into the bigger picture of Gale Crater and Mount Sharp,” said Curiosity Deputy Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada, before continuing, “This rock has an appearance quite different from the sandstones we’ve been driving through for several months. The landscape is changing, and that’s worth checking out.”
The first touchdown: human missions to the surface of Mars have long been dreamed about and planned for. Sometime in the next 30 years or less, they’ll become a reality. And VR, AR and virtual worlds are likely to play a role (image: SpaceX)
Sometime in the next thirty years, it is likely that humans will set foot on the surface of Mars. The mission that takes them there might be an international government-sponsored mission, or it might be the result of private endeavour. However it comes about, it will be the culmination of decades of planning, hopes and dreams stretching back beyond the birth of the space age.
There is much that a crew on such a mission will be taking with them in terms of hardware, equipment and technology. And it is very likely that when looking down the list of technologies they’ll take with them, one will be able to find virtual reality, virtual worlds and augmented reality – an in a variety of roles and uses.
Take the crew’s psychological health and well-being for example. A round-trip mission to Mars will take between two and 2.5 years to complete, depending upon the “class” of mission undertaken.
The two classes of Mars mission: opposition (l), which are launched when Earth and Mars are on the same side of the Sun, and conjunction class (r) are launched when the Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the Sun both amount to a mission duration of 2 – 2.5 years
Throughout that entire time, they’ll be completely isolated from everything we take for granted here on Earth – the freedom to wander outdoors, the sight of a blue sky, green hills, rivers, the sea, cities, lakes, people; they’ll be confined to enclosed spaces which really don’t offer too much in the way of privacy. They’ll even be confined to meals from a menu set months in advance, with no real option to give into a whim for a particular delicacy if it isn’t on their vessel.
For the majority of the mission time, the only people they’ll be able to directly converse with are their fellow crew members – with a minimum round-trip time delay in communications between Earth and Mars of 8 minutes (and potentially as much as 40 minutes through parts of the mission), having real-time conversations with loved ones on Earth simply isn’t going to be possible; they’ll have to rely on pre-recorded messages and video and e-mail.
In these circumstances, stresses are bound to develop, both for the individual members of the crew and, potentially, between team members, no matter how carefully selected for compatibility ahead of the mission or how well-trained. One way of potentially dealing with them is through the use of VR and virtual environments, as NASA and other organisations have been investigating for much of the last decade.
It’s not hard to imagine, for example, a crew going to Mars with a library of pre-filmed environments and events which they can then explore and enjoy individually or together through the use of personal headsets – or for such a library to be updated with new items beamed via something like OPALS to their craft. Such environments and activities could provide psychological relief from the confines of the space vehicle.
In June 2014, NASA’s OPALS system beamed the high-definition, 36-second movie “Hello, World” from the International Space Station (travelling at 28,000 kilometres an hour (17,500 mph) to a receiver on Earth in just 3.5 seconds (compared to the 10-12 minutes radio communications would have required. Systems like OPAL offer the key to providing very high bandwidth communications capabilities between Earth and Mars, allowing much more data to be passed back and forth (image: NASA)
Similarly, high fidelity virtual world environments which support direct interaction, such as through haptic feedback mechanisms, might provide the means by which crew members can “remove” themselves from the confines of their vehicle and enjoy a variety of activities, including something we take for granted in VWs today – the ability to create and build.
ANSIBLE (A Network of Social Interactions for Bilateral Life Enhancement) was an initial attempt by NASA, working with SIFT and All These Worlds, to explore how virtual worlds might be leveraged to provide astronauts with environments which could be shared or used individually, and which might offer a range of AI interactions as well.
A screen capture of the main ANSIBLE environment. While OpenSim likely won’t be the VW of choice for a Mission to Mars, the ANSIBLE environment is perhaps the first step towards assessing how virtual world environments could ease the psychological pressures face by a confined crew on a long duration space mission (image: SIFT / All These Worlds)
An intriguing element with ANSIBLE was the exploration of the idea that virtual world environments could be asynchronously “shared” between crew members and their friends and family on Earth, allowing them to engage in shared content creation activities, for example, through the swapping back and forth of OAR files, the ability to engage in “shared” immersive games and so on. ANSIBLE researchers even suggested that used in this way, a personal virtual world space could enable an astronaut and their family “share” special occasions more personally than could be done via e-mail, radio or video.
Commenting on the used of immersive environments and haptic technologies in Moving to Mars: There and Back Again (Journal of Cosmology, 2010, Vol 12), Sheryl L. Bishop, Ph.D, noted, “Telepresence and full fidelity audio/video/3-D communication replay capability will provide for more effective psychological support and interaction for crew members and to families and friends back on Earth.”
In terms of crew welfare, virtual reality has another potential use: assisting in matters of fitness. Most current mission scenarios involve the crew travelling to and / or from Mars in a “weightless” environment. Such an environment can be detrimental to many aspects of human physiology – muscles, bones, heart, lungs, etc. It is therefore essential long exposure to weightlessness is countered by routine exercise of up to two hours every day.
Exercise is an essential part of life in micro-gravity, where muscles can easily atrophy, bones suffer calcium loss, the cardiovascular system weaken, etc., away from the pull of Earths gravity. VR could help make such exercise more interesting and help space crews “escape” to more Earth-like environments (image: NASA)
In the confines of a space vehicle, the opportunities for exercise tend to be limited and potentially boring. How much more pleasant it might be for an astronaut who, after lugubriously strapping themselves into a treadmill harness and making all the required tension adjustments ready for 30 or so minutes of going nowhere while staring at a bulkhead, could slip on a VR headset, and go for a run through a woodland park or along a beach, the sounds of nature or the waves in their ears?
It’s been a month since my last MSL update, so I’m lagging badly; however, mission news coming out of JPL has been a little lax, so I’m not too far behind the times.
Following my lastCuriosity report, drilling and sample-gathering in the area dubbed “The Kimberley” has been completed, and the rover is once more on the move, heading west before turning more to the south once more.
The drilling / sampling operation took place on Sol 621 (Monday May 5th, PDT, 2014), with the percussion drill mounted on the rover’s robot arm turret cutting a hole some 6.5 centimetres (2.6 inches) deep and 1.6 cem (0.63 in) across into a flat sandstone slab which had been dubbed “Windjana” shortly after Curiosity arrived in “The Kimberley” at the end of March 2014. The tailings gathered as a part of the drilling operations were delivered to the CHIMRA (Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis) system, in preparation for them to be transferred to the rover’s on-board science laboratory. Confirmation that the sample-gathering had been successful came early in the morning (PDT) on Tuesday May 6th.
Holey moley. An image captured by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) Curiosity’s robot arm turret on Sol 627 (May 12th PDT, 2014) showing the sample gathering hole cut into “Windjana”. Dark tailings from the operation lay around the hole and have partially filled the test drilling hole just below it. The two patches of grey visible slightly to the right and blow the drill holes mark the points where Curiosity’s ChemCam laser was used to vapourise dust covering the surface of the rock. Surface material around the rock was subjected to miniature “landslides” as a result of the percussive hammering of the drill (click to enlarge)
The drilling operation, the third time Curiosity has gathered samples from inside a Martian rock for analysis, has caused some excitement among the mission team. “The drill tailings from this rock are darker-toned and less red than we saw at the two previous drill sites,” Jim Bell, deputy principal investigator for Curiosity’s Mast Camera (Mastcam) said after the drilling operation. “This suggests that the detailed chemical and mineral analysis that will be coming from Curiosity’s other instruments could reveal different materials than we’ve seen before. We can’t wait to find out!”
Curiosity’s first two drilling operations took place over a year ago in the “Yellowknife Bay” area of Gale Crater, some four kilometres (2.5 miles) north-east of “The Kimberley”. Analysis of those samples, gathered from mudstone yielded evidence that “Yellowknife Bay” had once been a part of an ancient lakebed environment which contained key chemical elements and a chemical energy source that long ago provided conditions favourable for microbial life.
Following their transfer to CHIMRA, the tailings cut from “Windjana” were sifted and graded in readiness for delivery to the ChemMin (Chemical and Mineralogical analysis) and SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) suites of instruments, located in the body of the rover. The initial sample transfer to both instrument suites was made on May 15th PDT, 2014. and analysis of the samples should be carried out as the rover continues its journey towards the lower slopes of “Mount Sharp”.
A composite of eight shots from MAHLI showing successive dot-like strikes from the ChemCam laser, both within the sample drilling hole at “Windjana” and where the tailings have mixed with surface dust (top right). Such strikes allow the chemical composition of the dust and rock to be analysed (click to enlarge)
Prior to departing “The Kimberley”, Curiosity carried out a final set of science operations. These involved using the turret-mounted MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager) and spectrometer to examine the texture and composition of the cuttings from the sample drill hole in situ. The ChemCam laser was also used to vapourise some of the drill tailings on the surface of “Windjana” and rock from the inside of the sample hole itself, allowing the ChemCam to analyse the chemical composition of the resultant vapours.
Thursday May 28th saw SpaceX, the private sector space company founded by Elon Musk, unveil the next iteration of their Dragon space vehicle, the Dragon V2.
Dragon has been in operation in an unmanned mode since 2010, and was the first commercially built and operated spacecraft to be recovered successfully from orbit. In May 2012, it commenced uncrewed resupply flights to the International Space Station (which I covered here) as a part of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) development programme.
Elon Musk unveils the Dragon V2 capsule, May 29th, 2014 (image: SpaceX)
Dragon V2 (which had previously been called Dragon Rider by the company) is a natural progression of the Dragon spacecraft, and while always in Spacex’s plans, having been originally announced in 2006, it has been part-funded by two US Government contracts, the Commercial Crew Development 2 (CCDev 2) in April 2011, and the Commercial Crew integrated Capability (CCiCap) in August 2012, both of which are focused on developing crewed vehicles capable of supporting the International Space Station (ISS) and of operating in low Earth orbit (LEO).
Dragon V2 is capable of carrying up to seven crew, or a combination of crew and cargo. The vehicle is intended to be reusable, and capable of landing almost anywhere in the world using propulsive-landing via its eight SuperDraco engines (Dragon 1 is only capable of making splash downs). However, Dragon V2 will retain a parachute descent system for use as a back-up, although it can still make a safe touch-down even if two of its eight descent engines fail. Also, unlike Dragon 1, which makes a close rendezvous with the ISS before being grabbed by one of the station’s robot arms and manoeuvred into a docking position, Dragon 2 will be able to undertake fully automated dockings with the ISS.
Dragon 2 making a control landing, post-mission (image: SpaceX)
Nor does it end there. There are some ambitious plans for Dragon. The head shield, for example, is already capable of protecting the vehicle during re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere at velocities equivalent to those of a vehicle returning from the Moon or from Mars – and SpaceX has been working with NASA Ames Centre, California, on a conceptual uncrewed Mars mission evolution called Red Dragon.
Artist’s visualisation of how Red Dragon might appear when landing on Mars were the project to go ahead (image: SpaceX)
Potentially funded under NASA’s Discovery mission programme, Red Dragon, if given the green light, would provide a cost-effective means for NASA to undertake a sample return mission to Mars, allowing up to two tonnes of samples to be returned to Earth for detailed investigation and analysis in 2022, ahead of NASA’s goal of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s.
Other have even more ambitious plans for Dragon and Mars. Dutch-based Mars One plans to kick-start a permanent, self-sufficient human colony on Mars from the mid-2020, with crews leaving Earth on a one-way trip every two years. According to the Mars One website, they hope to be able to use the Dragon vehicle and its associated Falcon 9 heavy launch vehicle also constructed by SpaceX, although there has been no public confirmation as to whether formal discussions with SpaceX have taken place.
Such plans aside, however, the first actual crewed mission for Dragon V2 is unlikely to occur prior to 2016. The next major milestone for the vehicle is a launchpad abort test, scheduled for later in 2014.
This will see the vehicle positioned at pad height and then launched to simulate an emergency in which the crew must escape their launch vehicle. After this, in 2015, there should be a high altitude abort test at Max Q, the period in the vehicle’s ascent when it is exposed to the maximum dynamic pressure. Both tests will feature the use of the vehicle’s SuperDraco engines, which form a part of the escape system as well as powering the craft during descent and landing. Capable of multiple re-starts and what is called “deep throttling”, the engines are themselves unique – the first ever fully printed rocket engines ever flown, produced by a direct metal laser sintering process.
If both of these tests are successful then it is conceivable that Dragon V2 could make an initial uncrewed orbital flight towards the end of 2015, and its first crewed flight in 2016.
Curiosity has resumed its long drive towards the point where it can begin its examination of the huge mound sitting at the centre of Gale Crater which NASA has dubbed “Mount Sharp” (its official name is Aeolis Mons).
The rover recently stopped-off at an area dubbed “Waypoint 1”, the first of several potential stop-over points on the rover’s route, where it will carried out various studies of the surroundings.
Curiosity departed the area on September 22nd after spending some 10 days examining rocks at “Waypoint 1”, and is once more travelling slowly but steadily towards the point mission managers have identified for it to bypass a dune field lying between it and “Mount Sharp”. Along the way, it is liable to make around four more stops.
While at “Waypoint 1”, the rover spent time examining a rocky outcrop dubbed “Darwin”, using a range of instruments to gather images and data which again showed that Gale Crater was once the scene of considerable water activity.
A mosaic of four images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera shows detailed texture in a ridge on the rock outcrop dubbed “Darwin” the rover studied at “Waypoint 1”. The images were obtained shortly before sunset Sol 400 (Sept. 21, 2013) with the camera 25 cm (10 inches) from the rock. Scale is indicated by the Lincoln penny from the MAHLI calibration target, shown beside the mosaic.
“We examined pebbly sandstone deposited by water flowing over the surface, and veins or fractures in the rock,” said Dawn Sumner of University of California, Davis, a Curiosity science team member with a leadership role in planning the stop. “We know the veins are younger than the sandstone because they cut through it, but they appear to be filled with grains like the sandstone.”
While much of the outcrop was covered in the all-too-familiar oxidised Martian dust, there were a patches of bare rock scattered across its surface in which sand deposits and pebbles could be seen, and it was these that drew the attention of the science team.
A mosaic of nine images, taken by the MAHLI camera, shows detailed texture in a conglomerate rock bearing small pebbles and sand-size particles. Again, these images were captured on Sol 400 (Sept. 21, 2013) with the camera positioned about 10 cm (4 inches) from the rock. Scale is indicated by the Lincoln penny from the MAHLI calibration target, shown beside the mosaic.
Following extensive studies of the outcrop, the science team interpret the sand and pebbles in the rock as material that was deposited by flowing water, then later buried and cemented into rock, forming conglomerates. Research will now focus on the textures and composition of the conglomerates as Curiosity continues onward, to understand its relationship to stream bed conglomerate rock found closer to Curiosity’s landing site. Doing so, together with studies to be undertaken at the remaining waypoints, should help scientists to piece together the relationship between rock layers at “Yellowknife Bay” where the mission found evidence of an ancient freshwater-lake environment favourable for microbial life, and the rock layers at the main destination on lower slopes of “Mount Sharp”.
Water, Water, Everywhere
On September 27th, the Curiosity team published five reports in the journal Science which discuss the mission’s findings during the first four months of the rover’s time on Mars. A key finding from this work is that water molecules are bound to fine-grained soil particles, accounting for about 2 percent of the particles’ weight at Gale Crater. This result has global implications, because these materials are likely distributed around the Red Planet.
The presence of water was discovered as a result of samples of surface material being heated to the point of vapourisation within a small oven inside Curiosity – and the most abundant vapour detected was H2O. The quantity of water molecules bound-up in the Martian soil suggest that as much as two pints of water could be obtained through the heating of one cubic foot of Martian dirt.
This discovery potentially has major implications for any long-term human presence on Mars in the future. The water – once subjected to appropriate treatment to remove unwanted minerals, such as a perchlorate, which has also been found in small amounts within Martian soil samples and can interfere with the thyroid function – could be used for cleaning and drinking purposes. It could also be electrolysed and used in the creation of oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen could then be used for a variety of purposes, including as a raw fuel, or in the production of fuel in the form of methane (created by combining the hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere), which could be used with oxygen to power surface vehicles.
An interesting part of the study is that the analysis of the chemicals and isotopes in the gases released during the analysis of soil samples indicates that the water molecules are the result of an interaction between the soil on Mars and the current atmosphere of the planet; so the process of depositing the water molecules is ongoing, rather than the result of some past mechanism. Even the discovery of perchlorate in the samples is of significance; previously, this had only been found in soil samples examined at the high latitude Phoenix Lander site. That they’ve now also been found in a near-equatorial latitude suggests they have a global distribution as well.
The other papers released by the science team further confirm earlier studies into the mineral composition of samples gathered and studied during the rover’s initial four months on Mars using its full suite of sample analysis tools: MAHLI, APXS, ChemCam, SAM, and CheMin, all of which can perform a range of complementary as well as disparate analyses.
One of the papers additionally focuses on a rock I covered back in the early days of the mission – Jake_M. Named in memory of NASA / JPL engineer Jacob Matijevic, who worked on all three generations of NASA’s Mars rovers and who passed away shortly after Curiosity arrived in Gale Crater, Jake_M was thought to be quite unlike any other rock on Mars – not because of its pyramid-like shape, but because of its composition.
“Jake_M”, the remarkable rock examined by Curiosity on September 22nd 2012, and believed to be a mugearite type of rock. The markings show where ChemCam and APXS were used to examine it
The paper published in Science confirms that Jake_M is most like a mugearite, a type of rock found on islands and rift zones on Earth.
On August 25th 2012, while the eyes of the global space community were focused almost entirely on the happenings in a crater on Mars, a significant event took place approximately 18 billion kilometres (11 billion miles) from Earth. Voyager 1 passed through the heliopause, the boundary between what is regarded as the “bubble” of space surrounding the solar system (heliosphere) which is directly influenced by the Sun, and “true” interstellar space.
The heliosphere and its component elements
That the spacecraft might be nearing the so-called “bow shock” area where the solar wind meets interstellar space was indicated by engineers and scientists working on the Voyager project in June 2012; however, it was not until September 2013 that NASA JPL felt confident enough in the data they’d received to confirm that Voyager 1 had in fact passed into interstellar space in August 2012, the first man-made object to have done so, some 35 years after having been launched from Earth in what was a highly ambitious programme of deep-space exploration.
The Voyager programme actually had its roots in a much more ambitious programme, the so-called Grand Tour. First put forward by NASA engineer Gary Flandro, The Grand Tour proposed the use of a planetary alignment which occurs once every 175 years, together with the potential to use the gravities of the planets as a means by which space probes could explore the outer planets of the solar system.
The idea of using gravity of the planets to help propel a space craft had first been realised by a young mathematician, Michael Minovitch, in 1961. With the aid of the (then) fastest computer in the world, the IBM 7090, Minovitch had been trying to model solutions to the “three body problem” – how the gravities of two bodies (generally the Earth and the Sun) influence the trajectory and velocity of a third (generally a comet or asteroid) moving through space; something astronomers and mathematicians had long wrestled with.
The men behind Voyager: Michael Minovitch (l), circa 1960; Gary Flandro (c), circa 1964; and Ed Stone (r), the project scientist and long-time advocate of the mission, circa 1972 (Stone later went on to serve as NASA’s Director at JPL)
Through his work, Minovitch showed how an object (or space vehicle) passing along a defined trajectory close to a planetary body could, with the assistance of the planet’s gravity, effectively “steal” some of the planetary body’s velocity as it orbited the Sun, and add it to its own.
At the time, his findings were received with scepticism by his peers, and Minovitch spent considerable time and effort drawing-up hundreds of mission trajectories demonstrating the capability in order to try to get people to accept his findings. But it was not until 1965, when Flandro started looking into the upcoming “alignment” of the outer planets (actually a case of the outer planets all being on the side of the Sun, rather than being somehow neatly lined up in a row) due in the late 1970s, that Minovitch’s work gained recognition.
Recognising the opportunity presented by the alignment, Flandro started looking at how it might be used to undertake an exploratory mission. In doing so, he came across Minovitch’s work and realised it presented him with exactly the information needed to make his mission possible, and so the Grand Tour was born.
Voyager: the most prominent element of the vehicle is the communications dish; below and to the left of this is the nuclear RTG power source; extending out to the top left is the instrument boom, and to the right the imaging boom and camera system
This mission would have originally seen two pairs of spacecraft launched from Earth. The first pair, departing in 1976/77 would form the MJS mission, for “Mariner (then the USA’s most capable deep-space vehicle)-Jupiter-Saturn”. These would fly by Jupiter and Saturn and then on to tiny Pluto; while a second pair of vehicles launched in 1979 which would fly by Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune.
Budget cuts at NASA following Apollo eventually saw the Grand Tour scaled-back to just two vehicles, Voyager 2 and Voyager 1, but the overall intent of the mission remained intact under the Voyager Programme banner, now led by Ed Stone. In the revised mission, both spacecraft would perform flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, with Voyager 2 using Saturn to boost / bend it on towards Uranus and from there on to Neptune, while Voyager 1 would approach Saturn on a trajectory which would allow it to make a flyby of Saturn’s huge Moon Titan, of significant interest to astronomers because of its thick atmosphere. This route would preclude Voyager 1 from reaching Pluto, as it would “tip” the vehicle “up” out of the plane of the ecliptic and beyond even Pluto’s exaggerated orbit around the Sun, and push it onto an intercept with the heliopause.
August 5th marked the 2nd anniversary on Curiosity’s landing on Mars. The “landiversary”, as NASA dubbed the occasion, passed in something of a subdued manner in many respects, featuring a re-run of the August 2012 video reviewing the MSL’s arrival on Mars. Reviews of the mission from the perspective of two years on from that remarkable lading didn’t start-up until the days after the anniversary, with videos and lectures from members of the mission team.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 