Videos

Dr. Cameron Smith, anthropologist and developer of pressure suits at Smith Aerospace Garments explores the new Mars yard at SAM while encumbered by one of his pressure suits, the same worn by crew members at SAM for their EVAs. In this short film Dr. Smith exits the functional airlock of the SAM habitat and then engages the reduced gravity simulator set to the Mars gravity of one-third that on Earth. He explores sedimentary rock layers, an ancient lava tube, a geologically recent rock fall, and gypsum veins.

IMAGINATION I at the Space Analog for the Moon and Mars
by Arlene Islas

UArizona professional artists served as crew members in a simulated moon mission, called Imagination 1. The Space Analog for the Moon and Mars, or SAM, a 1,100-square-foot pressurized and hermetically sealed facility that would be their home for the next six days and five nights. The crew was led by Christopher Cokinos, a nonfiction writer and professor emeritus of English, and also included Julie Swarstad Johnson, a poet and Poetry Center archivist and librarian, and Ivy Wahome, a textile artist and Master of Fine Arts candidate in costume design and production at the School of Theatre, Film & Television. The goal was to explore the value of art in space exploration and produce creative works inspired by the limitations and possibilities of life and culture beyond Earth.

This made-for-fun video has the SAM development team using the SAM Reduced Gravity Simulator (RGS) 50 foot track for the first time, testing a single-axis trolley. The next stage of development is the fabrication and test of the gravity-offload rig which will provide variable degrees of reduced gravity simulation in the ultimate Mars yard and terrain park.

Learn more about fabrication of the SAM RGS and the use of reduced gravity simulators at NASA for more than five decades.

A variety of audio recordings captured during the six months endeavor to restore pressurized functionality to the 1987 Test Module, prototype for the Biosphere 2 and cornerstone to the Space Analog for the Moon and Mars, SAM.

The SAM Symposium 2020 is concluded with a dozen team members from around the world sharing their enthusiasm and expertise in helping our species become interplanetary.

You can watch all of the videos at samb2.space/sam/podcasts-videos

01 + 02 – Open with Kai Staats, and a welcome by Dr. Joaquin Ruiz, UA VP of Global Environmental Futures and Executive Director at Biosphere 2
03 – Taber MacCallum, Founder, Co-CEO & CTO for Space Perspective
04 – Ewan Reid, CEO of Mission Control Space Services
05 – Dr. Cameron Smith, Founder and Trent Tresch, Researcher at Smith Aerospace Garments
06 – Ezio Melotti, Lead front-end Developer at SIMOC
07 – Anastasiya Stepanova, Engineer at the Institute of Biomedical Problems and SIRIUS
08 – Dr. Shannon Rupert – Director of the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS ), Mars Society
09 – Michael Blum and the UA CEAC / Mars-Lunar Greenhouse student team
10 – Coby Scheidemantel and the UA ENGR 498 Capstone student team
11 – Bryan Versteeg, Conceptual Designer at Space Habs
12 – John Adams, Deputy Director at Biosphere 2 and Kai Staats, Director of SAM