Postcards from Mars

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 a the Mational Geographic Education 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.

After more than two months focused effort on improving performance, stability, and the user interface, we have produced a launch beta product that installs on Linux, OSX, Windows, both personal computers and servers alike. The performance improvements are astounding, with 500 simulation time-steps running in just 50 seconds, or 5 hours per second. This means we can simulate roughly one full day on Mars in roughly 5 seconds. And this includes the front-end (web dashboard). If we run the server alone, it is even faster!

Stay tuned!

Well into Phase III, the SIMOC development team is preparing for debut launches with partners National Geographic Society and the Arizona Science Center this summer.

We have completed the redesign and rebuild of the Configuration Wizard upon a highly flexible, scalable code foundation, with both a Novice and Advanced configuration. The dashboard is now being rebuilt, based upon the same, new code base that supports the Wizard.

The Agent-Based Model (ABM) is now highly programmable by means of the JSON file settings. Most important is introduction of non-linear (normal, log, sigmoid, exp) functions to describe plant growth and respiration cycles as close as possible to the real world.

With the close of May 2019 and the Phase III development cycle, SIMOC will enjoy a more robust back-end server, improved performance and stability.

Stay tuned!

The research project is cleaned up, all equipment returned to boxes, shelves, and storage units. The barley has been dried for comparison to the original seeds, with an astounding result: 800g seeds, just 450g dry mass after fully mature plants are achieved.

SIMOC was configured to closely approximate the biomass accumulation, water retention and loss, and CO2 production for the duration of the live experiment. We consider this a success, as SIMOC is given its first non-linear functionality.

The draft paper is complete and submitted to ICES, the International Conference on Environmental Systems. Thank you University of Arizona for funding to make this possible, and the Biosphere 2 for hosting, supporting, and helping to guide this rapid-fire experiment.