29.2. The Marsraiser!

Thank you for the Marsraiser!

Thank you to everyone who was interested in hearing about our Epic Challenges, and was brave enough to try insect-food, drive the miniature Mars-rover, or take a look at Mars landscapes with virtual reality. What a special way to spend the leap day of 2016, you taking a leap toward us and us taking a step in reaching our goals.

Krista from bioMARS giving our pitch talk to visitors.

Many were eager to try out our insect-cookies, which had crickets, ants, and some of them had worms.

We also prepared some fried crickets, with chili, and with garlic. Very tasty!

Here are the suspicious faces of bioMARS' Mariia and Kristina, but they had the courage to try some as well!

Everyone at Marsraiser were lucky enough to take the miniature Mars-Rover for a spin.

Here is Olli presenting the Oculus Rift, where we could see a Martian landscape!

Our Epic teams wish to thank everyone who contributed to the event!

Sincerely, bioMARS

Team Red Sandbox

(Isn't it just the worst when you show up at a party and someone's wearing the same thing as you? ;) )

22.2. Call to Tim Kopra

Hello y'all, and with interesting news!

We got to make an arranged video-call to the ISS, and to talk with astronaut Tim Kopra. Arcusys was kind to host the event here in Joensuu. Afterwards some local media interviewed us, and you can check some material here (interview in Finnish only, but Mr. Kopras introduction video is in english).

We cannot say what information was exchanged exactly, but we had prepared some questions alongside Team Red Sandbox about our unique challenges, and asked Kopra for his insight on the matters. His experiences and knowledge of the realities about space-travelling will help us develop our concepts. Not to mention how huge of a privilege it was just to be present at such a call.

Did you know Mr. Kopra is Finnish-American? He is very respectable for his accomplishments in both the US army, and as an astronaut. You can read more about his career HERE.

Thank you for all your support! Next week we have all new exciting news, so stay tuned!

Here we have a picture of some of bioMARS' and Team Red Sandbox' members waiting for the call to start.

Interview with an astronaut?

Hello!
This time we don't have much new to report you - everyone is still working with their experiments - but stay tuned for next week! BioMars will soon be discussing with astronaut Timothy Kopra who is currently working at International Space Station. We'll be sure to tell the highlights here at our blog so be sure to check them out. Have a nice week!

There's always more to find out!

Hello, everyone!
First of all I want to thank everyone who filled out our insect-eating survey! Now we have plenty of data to analyze and use in our future concepts. We are also glad that so many of the participants are willing to try out actually eating some insects. Now the only thing we need to do is to find some nice grasshopper cookie recipies...
This week we started doing more experiments. Because we have so much to find out and only a finite amount of time we split the group into three sub-teams.
I won't tell precise details about these experiments yet but I can tell you we need an air-tight cabinet, fly maggots and some basil saplings. Sounds fun, right?
The other sub-teams' stuff is so secret even we don't know much about it. (Or then we were just too busy with our own plans to ask them. Who knows?) Hopefully things will clarify over the next week.
I hope you all have a wonderful day!

1.2. Survey for you!

Hello, our dear readers!

We, bioMARTIANS, are thinking about including insects in the Mars-habitat menú, and built up a survey about that. Would you be ready to try food made of insects?

If you'd like, please answer our little survey HERE (Link opens Google Docs)
If you're located in the Finland, Joensuu -area, you might get a chance of actually eating insects.

Thank You so much for contributing to science! ;)

20.1. T(eam)-shirts are here!

Hey everyone!

We are tributing our (so far) successful journey to science with our official T-shirts, and as January has boosted us to experiment designs, and more detailed concepts, it's nice to be identified as a team, rather than just individuals.

We are bioMARS!

Currently we're comparing different types of systems used to grow food, and figuring the best concepts from our own ideas.

We're investigating the wide web for people who've done it before us, so feel free to leave us a link to an experiment on food-growing, if you know some! :)

2016: Back to business!

Hey!
Tonight was our first official meeting of 2016, and now that we're roughly halfway through our time of the Epic Challenge Joensuu (we're scheduled to finnish in May), we will begin experimenting with our selected concepts for food growing units, and prototyping!

As we have come up with more than a hundred concepts, now each team member will try to make a testing experiment of two promising concepts, and provide the rest of the team with information on those concepts, so it will come easier to get rid of bad concepts.

Our journey has concentrated more on theory up till now, but things are about to get more exciting once the prototyping phase begins! Thanks for following us also on Facebook!

Until next time!