TANGO CONTROLS FOR MARS CITY  

As part of its project MARS CITY (www.mars-city.org) the Italian Mars Society (www.marsplanet.org) has as scope the simulation of all the systems and sub-systems of a future MARS CITY. The systems include Mars Stations with their laboratories, Mars vehicles, rovers, astronauts assistants and devices including space suits, external data source coming from Earth telecommunications and astronomical systems, Martian geolocalization and on site weather and physical conditions forecast devices. The challenges related to the simulation of such systems are enhanced by the heterogeneous nature of the devices and of data which can be solved by means of uniform communication protocol, oversight of system’s status and an easy checking systems able to control the different devices.

Tango Controls has been chosen by the IMS as the unifying protocol to implement the above and also as a general protocol for the Virtual Simulation of Mars - a program called V-MARS to simulate by means of Virtual Reality the human exploration of Mars and of the developed Mars City.

The team  of developers is composed of about  60 people  distributed in different countries, of which only a part of them are programming with Tango. Refer to the git repository (https://github.com/mars-planet/mars_city) and the MARS Tango documentation to find out more about what has been done with Tango in the scope of this project.

For more information contact  Antonio Del Mastro (segreteria at marssociety.it)