Crew morale will be a significant concern on long-duration interplanetary missions where communication is severely bandwidth-limited and time-delayed; this project demonstrates that the simple ability to text might provide an easy way to mitigate these concerns. The high-school-age son of one of the participants in a Mars Desert Research Station analog astronaut mission developed a special Discord text-only messaging server that simulated the light-time delay between Earth and Mars. In addition to all-crew channels for talking to mission support, each crew member had a set of private channels for talking to family and friends. Early bugs in the server were resolved by Sol 2. During the mission, the crew sent and received over 3500 messages across all channels. Crew members used Discord to stay in touch, conduct STEM outreach, consult with subject-matter experts, text with each other, and even to ask friends to look up information from "Earth" internet. The Discord server was highly effective with the relatively short five-minute light-time delay; future efforts might explore its effectiveness as the light-time delay grows to its maximum of about 20 minutes.
A Low-Bandwidth Approach to Analog Astronaut Communication at the Mars Desert Research Station
2024-03-02
3480814 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Crew Experience at the Mars Desert Research Station
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