Research & Development

The SIMOC development team continues to meet twice each week, as we have since October 2017. With this Phase VIII development cycle SIMOC is gaining momentum toward a more scalable, robust simulation tool while at the same time we are refining the SIMOC Live sensor arrays with a diverse user base actively engaged.

One of our primary objectives is to determine if the existing dashboard, built entirely on in-house developed code should be maintained, or replaced with Home Assistant which would allow us to take advantage of a dynamic array of existing tools for visualizing the data generated by the agent-based model simulation engine.

We are returning to the effort to enable the simulation of a habitat on the Moon, with most of the code already in place. While the interior of the habitat will be nearly identical to that of a habitat on Mars, the solar panels will of course generate far more electricity given their proximity to the sun, but suffer from 14 days of night, which will require a massive battery array or an alternative energy source such as an Radioisotope Thermal Generator (RTG).

One the SIMOC Live side we are working with a National Geographic Explorer who is this week testing one of our handheld units on an ice field. The Austrian Space Forum last week completed first integration of SIMOC into their advanced pressure suit simulator. And the Arizona Science Center is working with Kai Staats, Executive Director of Over the Sun, LLC and project lead for SIMOC to invigorate and expand the SIMOC exhibit that has been operating in the downtown Phoenix facility since September 2024.

And much more! Stay tuned!

The SIMOC team met today, for a three hours call, to dive into development Phase VIII. The phases of development are defined by major transitions in design, focus, and project goals. Phase VII was focused almost entirely on developing SIMOC Live for use at the Space Analog for the Moon & Mars (SAM). With Phase VIII we will return our focus to SIMOC proper, the agent-based model (ABM) based model and educational web interface.

Here are just a few notes from our team meeting, to give you a sense of where we are headed in the coming year.

• Implement an inhabitant wellness index with unique properties for each human.
• Transition human breathing, water and food consumption, and liquid and solid waste production from an hourly average into a more realistic schedule.
• Differentiation for male and female inhabitants for some biological functions (body mass, quantity of food consumed, O2 consumption, CO2 production).
• Update greenhouse panel(s) to provide data for food cultivar growth, with ability to display all plants at once and then zoom-in to learn about each square meter.
• Introduce tracking of each molecule of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and more from start to finish of the simulation run.
• Introduce a more dynamic representation of inedible biomass versus food, nutrition and calories, and composting.
• Implement the code-ready staggered planting and harvesting.
• Lay the foundation for the user to select Science Mode or Game Play Mode where both are still built on the science-based foundation of data and code, but the Game Play mode allows the user to pause and adjust variables along the way.
• And improve the Configuration Wizard to accommodate the above items.

So much good stuff coming! Stay tuned!

The SIMOC team is actively engaged in the development of the SIMOC Live sensor array hardware and on-board web interface. Driven by an increasing number of users and their diverse deployments, the intent is to provide a robust visualization interface coupled with a light, functional data administration environment. With a phone or tablet in hand, one can quickly review the data on-board any given SIMOC Live stand-alone sensor array configured for the “stand-alone” mode (on-board DHCP, web service).

Today Kai Staats, project lead for SIMOC, provided the development team with a new User Story to guide redevelopment of the SIMOC Live “stand-alone” unit composed of a Raspberry Pi Zero, one or more Adafruit sensors, and an on-board DHCP server and web interface.

THE STORY
User desires to employ SIMOC Live to monitor air quality in a remote location, far from an urban environment where grid power, cell reception, and radio wifi are not available.

User has deployed multiple units, but the distance between them is too great or obstacles inhibit a mesh network.

a) User will physically visit the field site once per [month, quarter, year].

b) Power is provided to the SIMOC Live unit via [solar, wind, portable battery pack, generator].

c) All data must be stored locally, on-board the SIMOC Live unit.

User returns to each unit, one at a time in succession, to view and/or download data.

If included, an on-board OLED screen provides current status of each primary data collection channel for each sensor. For example, …

The SIMOC team is slowly but surely working to correct a number of small but important issues in the SIMOC experience, as follows:

• Presets
• Front-end library updates and fixes
• Deploying latest version of all libraries
• Designing and prototyping new web dashboard

Born of the Analog Astronaut Community, the World’s Biggest Analog (WBA) is a volunteer-based, two weeks mission in which 16 Moon and Mars habitats across four continents will attempt the largest synchronized analog mission ever attempted.

SAM Director of Research Kai Staats brought SIMOC Live to the WBA as one of the proposed science projects. SIMOC Live is a real-time air quality monitoring extension to the SIMOC agent-based model and educational web interface. Once accepted in 2024, the all-volunteer SIMOC team composed of Ezio Melotti, Franco Carbognani, and Shantanu Parmar worked to prepare a fully revised Raspberry Pi image and semi-automated configuration that enables each sensor array, no matter its location on Earth, to direct its data stream to a central repository on server. The Mission Control Center hosted by the Austrian Space Forum is then able to monitor the air quality for all of the habitats on a single computer monitor.

One or more SIMOC Live sensor arrays was shipped to eight habitats on four continents such that a live data broadcast is now providing a single-screen monitor in the Austrian Space Forum’s Mission Control Center. As such, the air quality of each represented habitat is presented in real-time.

JULY 2026 UPDATE
The results of this project are summarized in a peer reviewed paper published at the International Conference on Environmental Systems (ICES), “SIMOC Live: A Multi-Habitat Sensor Array Deployment at the World’s Biggest Analog Mission“.

This summer is seeing many exciting updates for SIMOC, with an in depth story for each coming soon!

• The SIMOC Live development team continue to improve the code and test the platform, with the original and new 64-bit Raspberry Pi Zeros tested and functional.
    
• Several new Adafruit sensors are being tested, including light intensity, a microphone, and IR sensor for proximity awareness. The goal is to give SIMOC Live the ability to capture movement inside a habitat such that the approximate location of the crew members can be correlated to CO2 levels in each room, but without video capture or individual identity tracking.
    
• An Adafruit GPS and accelerometer are being tested as well, looking to a future in which SIMOC Live may be redesigned as a hand-held unit or deployed in a pressure suit during EVAs.
    
• The Arizona Science Center is installing an interactive SIMOC Live kiosk! More to come, soon!
    
• The Analog Astronaut Conference has accepted our proposal for SIMOC Live to be deployed in each of the nine habitats world-wide as a ELCSS monitoring system. While each habitat already has some level of air quality monitoring, the installation of SIMOC Live across the entire domain will provide a singular data format and seamless, (delayed) real-time monitoring from the central Mission Control Center.
    
• Ezio and Franco will venture to Poland to install SIMOC Live at the famous Lunares habitat analog for their upcoming mission for the month of September. This will be a proof of concept for remote monitoring of a habitat beyond SAM.  
• The National Science Teachers Association will soon publish a feature article about SIMOC—stay tuned!

Again, each of the above will be expanded into individual photo essays … stay tuned!

The new SIMOC Live version 2.0 now incorporates an ad hoc, mesh network, with full data redundancy across all nodes. Sensor arrays built on a Raspberry Pi Zero and Adafruit sensors captured data in each of the four primary nodes of SAM: lung, Test Module, Engineering Bay, and Crew Quarters.

More photos, data, and a complete story coming soon!

For now, visit moonandmars.space/blog …

Lead developer of SIMOC Ezio Melotti arrive to SAM at Biosphere 2 mid February. He receive Christopher Murtagh, Systems Architect and colleague of Kai Staats for more than twenty years. Together they built the point-to-point wireless feed from the SAM Operations Center to the Mars yard and into the SAM habitat analog. Chris built a new version of the SAM light-travel time delayed email server while Ezio continued to fine tune the form and function of the latest build of SIMOC Live and its sensor array.

Chris departed and Franco Carbognani arrived, a Sr. Engineer at the VIRGO gravitational wave observatory to work with Ezio on the SIMOC Live ad hoc, full mesh sensor array. This is a vast improvement on the version installed in SAM for the first two crew in that a unique sensor array will now be placed in the SAM lung, Test Module (green house), engineering bay, and crew quarters for a 4x increase in data generation and fidelity in air quality analysis.

To learn more, visit SAM …