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Projects: Drive a Mars Rover

Hosting a Mars Station

Click to enlarge > Credit: The Planetary Society

The Planetary Society is no longer providing technical support for the establishment of new Mars Stations. However, if you set up a Mars Station, we will gladly add it to our list.

To set up a Mars Station:

Begin by setting up a Red Rover, Red Rover Mars Site. Visit the Red Rover, Red Rover website and follow the links to the LEGO Education website, where you can purchase the necessary LEGO materials. The cost of the LEGO materials and a Webcam will be approximately $500.

You will also need a dedicated computer with its own IP address. In order for outside users to access the site, ports 10081 and 10082 or 81 and 82 must be open through your institution's firewall. Important compatibility note: Red Rover, Red Rover was developed for Windows 95/98 and a Serial interface to the LEGO Robotics equipment. Red Rover, Red Rover works with Windows XP, but attempts to host Mars Stations with Windows XP have met with mixed success. The USB LEGO Robotics interface will not work at all with Red Rover, Red Rover or Mars Stations.

Once you have set up a Red Rover, Red Rover Mars Site, any other person with the Red Rover, Red Rover software installed could visit and drive on your site. (A license to the software is not required to drive, only to host, so you may use a single copy of the software to host one site and drive it remotely from many other sites.) If you wish to run a program within your own school district, for example, setting it up as a Mars Station is not necessary! You only need to set up a Mars Station if you wish to throw access to your site open to the entire Internet.

Choose a location on Mars that you wish to simulate. Polar terrain? The interior of a canyon or crater? One of the past landing sites? Create a diorama representing the site. A good diorama size is approximately 1.5 meters in diameter. Walls are necessary to prevent visitors from driving out of the site entirely. Make sure that the topography of the site and the design of the rover are unlikely to result in the rover flipping over while unattended.

Download the Mars Station software (.zip file, 2.7 MB) and install it on your Red Rover, Red Rover computer. The Mars Station software is identical to the Red Rover, Red Rover software except that it also includes Internet driveability via a Web browser. You will need the Red Rover, Red Rover registration code you purchased from LEGO Education to install the Mars Station software.

Test your site by pointing a browser to the computer's dedicated IP address. Problems connecting to a site are almost always the result of security protections at your home institution; you will need to work with your network administrator to solve them and allow visitors driving access through your firewall.

Once your site works, notify tps@planetary.org and we will include a link to your site on the Drive a Mars Rover page.