Postcards from Mars

Today nine National Geographic Certified Educators, primary and secondary classroom instructors, were granted access to the SIMOC Phase IIIb launch candidate for a final review and test run in their virtual classrooms. This marks the second test by this team, the first in October 2019.

This is the first time SIMOC is running on the Google Cloud Platform, a massively scalable infrastructure for automated scaling, fail-over/restart, and for use by hundreds, even thousands of citizen scientists worldwide. We eagerly await their feedback for how they were able to integrate SIMOC into their lesson plans, and how their home-bound students engaged SIMOC, given Preset or custom habitat design exploration.

Eventually, even the most enjoyable computer software development projects must come to a close. SIMOC Phase IIIb is as of the close of April 2020 entering a feature and code freeze, save testing, bug squishing, and reliability enhancing across scalable cloud architectures.

The number of improvements to the back-end server and front-end dashboard are many, with the past five months dedicated to refining the agent definitions and their interactions, and improving the database and server-client communication protocol.

The second National Geographic review team commences on Monday, May 4 for a two weeks period.

Launch at the National Geographic Educational Resource Library is slated for June 1, 2020.

The SIMOC development team is nearly complete with server-side and front-end updates that now include support for cloud-based services such as those offered by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. This major update saw a redesign of the database for fast read and write times, and greater scalability. What’s more, the Configuration Wizard now includes all updates as suggested by the National Geographic review panel. The configuration procedure is now simplified, the number of steps reduced, and a preferred configuration can be saved to the user’s local drive for re-loading with the next run. The Dashboard too is nearly complete, with simulation data download the final, remaining update. The panel layout and functionality is improved, with a number of features we are eager to share, soon.

Progress!

We have concluded our first round of review by the National Geographic Certified Educator Review Team, primary and secondary classroom instructors who test computer software products in their own classroom. We have received feedback and are already working to revise and improve SIMOC accordingly. With the close of December we anticipate a final round of reviews before diving into Phase IIIb in the first half of 2020. This final effort will take us to a release candidate for the National Geographic Educational Resource Library.

Stay tuned!

We did it! Today we provided key partners with access to a beta release of SIMOC Phase IIIa. We now await their feedback, notes, and bugs in order to help us wrap the past ten months of development with the close of the year. Then we move into Phase IIIb in 2020, with the goal of improving realworld fidelity, the user Dashboard experience, and reliability over scalability across a cloud service platform. Come mid 2020, we intend to launch SIMOC at the National Geographic Educational Resource Library.

The SIMOC developers are (as I type) hard at work to wrap up loose ends and tighten the details for a soft-release to National Geographic on Monday. The Nat Geo review team will provide feedback for their experience of SIMOC and the associated educational curriculum. The SIMOC development team will then update and improve SIMOC through the month of October. This marks two and a half years in development, a team of a dozen developers in total with countless thousands of hours, and the support of individuals at NASA Johnson Space Center, NASA Kennedy, Arizona State University’s School of Earth & Space Exploration and Interplanetary Initiative, Paragon Space Development Corporation, and many other individuals from both private and public sector institutions.

We are excited for the day in which we can share SIMOC with you!

The months of July and August have seen a steady improvement in the SIMOC Configuration Wizard, Dashboard, and back-end server. With new team member and developer Ezio Melotti we have focused on ease of deployment and the user interface while Iurii and Sinead continued to fine tune back-end efficiency. In a system as complex as SIMOC, we have had to rethink and retool a few of our systems, including the means by which we request and then deliver data to the front-end. In so doing, we have doubled the performance and stabilized long duration runs. SIMOC is now a proper research tool, fully function from the command line or with web interface. The simulation of a modest habitat on Mars can be completed in roughly twenty minutes on a laptop, less on a more substantial system.

Software development does not always move from exciting milestone to major update.

Sometimes, as with sailing, you find the wind to be steady but not terribly strong, the direction consistent and the course well known. Each day you welcome the rising sun, and each night check your progress against the stars.

Steady as she goes, SIMOC is getting closer to a new home.