Mission
The most important activity conducted by Spacesim is its annual 120-hour simulated space mission. This mission is conducted in a simulated spacecraft, or Habitat, designed and built by the organization. The current habitat was built in the 2008/2009 school year, after the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board asked the OCESS to move to a different room within the same building. The previous habitat had been built in 2001.
Accompanying the Habitat is an array of custom-made software written by the current Teacher Adviser of the organization, Dr. James Magwood. This software handles everything from environmental conditions to the navigation and piloting of the Habitat. Dr. Magwood's work with the organization earned him Carleton University's 2010 Patrick O'Brien High School Teaching Award.
The most recent mission, in 2011, visited Europa, a moon of Jupiter, an anomalous object and the solar system Gliese 581. The original flight plan was to fly to the potentially habitable Gliese 581 G but due to unknown radiation levels and low fuel, the mission landed on Gliese 581 F. While the simulation generally steers away from speculative science such as a mission destination the existence of which is indeterminate, this year's was chosen to underscore for members the real life proliferation of exoplanets.
Previous missions include the 2010 mission, which visited three moons of Jupiter, the 2009 mission to Iapetus, the 2008 mission to Mars, and the 2007 mission to Borrelly.
Read more about this topic: Ottawa-Carleton Educational Space Simulation
Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“... [a] girl one day flared out and told the principal “the only mission opening before a girl in his school was to marry one of those candidates [for the ministry].” He said he didn’t know but it was. And when at last that same girl announced her desire and intention to go to college it was received with about the same incredulity and dismay as if a brass button on one of those candidate’s coats had propounded a new method for squaring the circle or trisecting the arc.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“When you’re dealing with monkeys, you’ve got to expect some wrenches.”
—Alvah Bessie, Ranald MacDougall, and Lester Cole. Raoul Walsh. Captain Nelson, Objective Burma, giving a subaltern a mission (1945)
“Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)