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TheSpaceGame — Design Your Route To Jupiter
An anonymous reader writes "The Advanced Concepts Team of the European Space Agency is celebrating World Space Week (4-10 October 2010) with the release of 'The Space Game,' an online game for interplanetary trajectory design. The Space Game is an online crowdsourcing experiment where you are given the role of a mission designer to seek the best path to travel through space. The interactive game, coded in HTML5, challenges the players to devise fuel-efficient trajectories to various bodies of the Solar System via a user-friendly interface. The aim of the experiment is get people from all ages and backgrounds to come up with better strategies that can help improve the effectiveness of the current computer algorithms. As part of the events organized worldwide for Space Week, the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant. The best scores by 10 October will be displayed on the Advanced Concepts Team website and the three best designs will also receive some ESA prizes."
It can make the Jupiter run in less than twelve parsecs.
This is exactly the kind of combinatorial optimization problem that is superbly well-suited for solution by software and quite possibly the last kind of problem you want to hand to a bunch of humans, unless those humans happen to be programmers with backgrounds in celestial mechanics, heuristics, and genetic algorithms.
As a way of driving public interest in the ESA's space program, it's not a bad idea at all, but if any of its users manage to come up with a better solution than the ESA's software, it's not a triumph for crowdsourcing, it's a sign that the ESA needs to hire new programmers.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Crowdsourcing for this may be a good bit of publicity, but is really just wasting time.
A genetic algorithm running on their "simulation" will find the best solution within the accuracy of the parameters very quickly. Run a couple of times to make sure it is the global minimum and you're done.
Their competition has a hard limit on mission duration and the goal is minumum delta-v, so the fitness function is very easy to define.
If anyone wants to win the competition, figure out how to write parameters to their simulation and read the delta-v and mission duration, run a GA for a while and you automatically win.
Chemical rockets just aren't a great option- at least let us use an ion engine, or perhaps let us see what we can do with a VASMIR?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I mean, anything beyond jupiter would be a challenge. But jupiter itself? Hohmann transfer orbit, maybe with a sling around mars (would give very very low boost in deltaV, so not worth the launch window constrains IRL but ok for this)...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Not so simple. You can gain a lot by getting boosts off of other planets and moons. I suspect that minimum is just under earth escape velocity, with a boost from the moon. Then over lots of orbits you can use earth flybys to modify your orbit. Might then be a win to use either Venus or Mars. The optimal path might take a VERY long time.
Don't forget the trick that burning your fuel deep in a gravity well is a big help - a near-solar flyby might also be an efficient route.
Of course the "right" way to do it is just use higher ISP engines and go direct so you get there quickly and don't need to wait half a generation to get your data.
--- Joe Frisch
Uh, I think so, Brain, but we'll never find a slingshot that's big enough.
You didn't need that DNA intact, did you?
Game design is hard. Let's go shopping!
So instead of "handicapping" yourself, you assume lightspeed travel and simplify the problem to a linear trajectory. Bravo?
is zero. Just need to get the right vehicle for that, i.e. one that looks like a monolith full of stars.
It sounds very similar to a game that was described in The Peace War by Vernor Vinge.
-John Fenley
...the first problem of the game is to reach Jupiter with the lowest amount of propellant.
I hate to be pedantic, but is the objective to arrive at Jupiter WITH the lowest amount of propellant, or is the objective to arrive at Jupiter USING the lowest amount of propellant? I suggest there is a big difference between the two.
Impetuous! Homeric!
Check out Orbiter - without a doubt the most realistic (and incredible) space flight simulator around. My little brother has basically taught himself orbital mechanics using Orbiter and online tutorials for the game (if you can call it that!) The real deal - Hohmann transfer orbits and spaceflight mechanics-type concepts I'd never heard of.
When I saw "the space game", I thought for sure they were talking about Orbiter. If "designing your own route to Jupiter" is something you're interested in, do yourself a favour and check it out.
You'd have to do it in two launches, it won't work with only one.
The first launch needs to terminate with significant mass at many miles per second in Washington D.C. prior to the Jupiter launch in order to prevent the whole Jupiter project being killed halfway through planning.
Hey, just sayin'.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Although I work in the Space Industry I am not a Rocket Scientist but it is my understanding that this is *not* a purely computer solvable problem and is explained on the GTOC website: http://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/mad/op/GTOC/indexII.htm
So basically just avoid the other planets along the way, and go the slowest speed imaginable?