The Minds Behind the Mission to Mars illustrates that future for our planet is interplanetary space travel. We talked to numerous people with knowledge and experience in space exploration, planetary science, astronomy education, as well as general interest in space itself. Throughout our piece, there are many topics covered about how space affects humans. Both NASA and Mars One plan to send people to mars and into deep space. However, Mars One is sending four people at a time in waves on a one way trip. NASA plans to bring the astronauts there and back. This will be the first time that people have ever traveled into deep space, and out of Earth's orbit. 

When we began the studio, we only knew that it would have to do with uprooting. On the first and second day, we were challenged with making a small one minute radio piece. This taught us how to edit, and gather audio out in the world. For this project, we focused on how the winter last year affected the T. We went around Central square and collected audio which was edited when we got back. Audacity was a little bit hard to learn at first, but after some practice, we got the hang of it. Our first piece turned out pretty well, especially for only one day to work on it.

The next day we were asked to start thinking about our final piece. -At first we had no idea which direction we wanted to take this in. Since it was open ended, Robert and I began talking about things we were interested in. After a long conversation, we arrived on the topic of space travel, to mars in particular. Soon after Robert and I made the decision, we began brainstorming who we wanted to interview and what we wanted to ask them. After creating a google doc, we wrote questions for the interviewees and also started placing links to relevant people and webpages. We began emailing people on the third day of the studio and didn’t hear back until the next afternoon. In that time, we finalized our list of questions and the recording booth got set up. The first person we heard back from was Rachel Kraft at NASA. She is in an administrative position and although we didn’t really get an interview from her, she gave us confidence in NASA and their quick responses. We also heard back from Laurel Kaye on wednesday. She is one of the candidates for Mars One. One of the visiting educators from Florida, Lori Bradner, put us in contact with people at NASA including Robert Cabana, the director of the Kennedy Space Center. It took a few days to hear a response, but in the end it was extremely worth it. Ms. Bradner was also personal friends with Janet Ivey, another one of our interviewees. Our final interview was Dan Carey, another Mars One Candidate. All of the interviews summed up to around an hour of audio. We had to trim this down to around 3 and a half minutes. As you can imagine, it took a lot of work to cut down more than 50 minutes.

    The final step was the editing stage. This included voiceover and other narrations for our project. We started by arranging all of the clips to a manageable length. Our first draft was around 5 minutes. This was more of a proof of concept, and less of a draft persay. We whittled the time down as much as we could, down to about 3 minutes. But we talked to the coaches and we decided that we had too much good material for us to cut it down any more. Hasit gave us a recommendation for a song that would play in the beginning and end. The song is “Life on Mars” by David Bowe. It is a very good piece of music that goes well with our radio package. The rest of editing was pretty tedious, having draft after draft and small edit after small edit. But eventually we arrived at where we are now, with a finished radio package.

Today our group made many advances on the project. I began with finalizing the different designs for the individual pieces. The three different designs were for the acrylic, felt and cotton. To test it out I first cut out the acrylic cut in cardbaord, but cut the other designs out of cotton and felt. To check they all fit we clued the cardboard pieces to the felt andthen sewed it to the cotton. Sammi added in the stuffing to make sure it had enough space for everything. We decided to offset the inner circle of the inner circle so that the seams had extra parts at the ends and make it easier to sew. Calder spent the day working on the pieces for the electronics because they still hadn't come. As a group we decided instead of having the collar actually work we will have a demo version because we won't have enough time. Sammi and I spent time talking to David about the code for the LEDS and he helped us write one to make sure that it would function properly. I finished the day off lasercutting the maoin design out of acrylic, felt and cotton. 

Today we made lots of changes to our design. First we made a mock-up out of cardboard and sewed the pieces together so that it was flexible. We thought initially that we wanted to make the neck piece out of fabric, but after talking to Rosie we felt the project may be better if we make it out of acrylic and fabric like the mirror neck piece. We decided to make another prototype that would be a lot more similar to the final so we undid all the stitches and taped the individual triangles to allow movement. We played with the placement of the fabric as well and the sizes of the triangles and how they would be aligned. The electronics still haven't come in yet so Calder spent time creating pieces to put around the buttons. He came up with many different designs and laser cut them and 3D printed them. Tomorrow we need to work really hard so that the project will be done on time.