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Story
An astronaut is planning an expedition on Mars in order to find sources of water for his/her research. They require internal systems to monitor the health of their spacesuit, and externals systems to determine their position, to measure their environment, and to determine clues leading to sources of water.
Description
The challenge is to design a system that will monitor essential parameters for the spacesuit, and notify the astronaut of any anomalies detected. This project is intended to model a system for monitoring gases (CO2, CH4), humidity, and pressure on Mars. The system will enhance the astronaut's spacesuit on Mars, containing both external and internal sensors.
The following parameters are monitored:
In summary, the system is capable of detecting the following conditions:
Hardware
Block Diagram representation of the device.
Setup
The system is equipped with the following hardware:
1. Teensy 3.6 - This is the controller for the system.
2. CCS811 - This is the internal sensor used to measure CO2 and TVOC.
3. BME680 - This is the external sensor used to measure pressure, temperature, and humidity.
4. MiCS-5524 - This is the external sensor used to detect methane gas.
The sensors are chosen based on availability and budget constraints for this project.
Design Challenges
In order to get accurate parameters on Mars, the sensor algorithm had to be modeled based on parameters of the Martian atmosphere. For example:
Resources:
[1] The Martian humidity is discussed here: https://www.space.com/29857-mars-humidity-alien-li...
[2] Out-gassing, described in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
[3] Altitude model is based on the work here: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/atmosmrm.html
[4] Datasheet for MiCS-5524: https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/product-files/3199/M...
Source Code:
Source code can be found here: https://github.com/rahmant3/Marscope
SpaceApps is a NASA incubator innovation program.