The Mars Barn is a combined educational and research facility.

• In its educational capacity, the barn offers a unique learning experience, based on the "realistic mission profile" principle. Rather than find answers about Mars and about space missions in a book, the students design a mission from their classroom, and then execute it over the Internet from their in-school Mission Control Center using robotic agents in order to find their answer.

  At the highest level of the program, the students design a rover and "launch" it to Mars by shipping it the Mars Barn - they then experience the anxiety of deployment, waiting for first data and images, and the satisfaction of extracting answers from a planet that doesn't easily give them up. For a more limited engagement, students can use Mars Barn "resident" rovers.

  All communications with the rovers are through the Internet and a standard wireless LAN, allowing maximum flexibility and use of standard web cams and micro-controllers. While at the Mars Barn, our network adds an artificial delay to all communications, and so Mission Control at the school experience realistic (or just noticeable) latencies. We also provide an overhead picture feed, through the same delayed network.

  For advanced groups, a Mars Exploration session can last many sessions, with only a single communication opportunity each time. For introductory level groups, the system can be configured for only Lunar-like delays.

• In its research capacity, the barn concentrates on very-long-latency collaborative telerobotics. The goal is to develop the software and hardware necessary to perform complex tasks such as construct a habitat using multiple robotic agents.

  In order to compare multiple protocols and algorithms, the Mars Barn presents a standardized benchmark challenge - constructing a pipeline between two reservoirs from long pipes that are best carried using two agents.

  As an added tool to attract "outside the box" solutions, an incentive cash prize is offered for solving the standard benchmark challenge.

In either case, operators never set foot at the Mars Barn, and all hardware is shipped in. Knowledge of the terrain is limited to what the operators can acquire using scout rovers and overhead imagery.

The preliminary scouting missions give the participants a chance to gain experience in remote operations and to test the performance of their basic hardware in the field.

Since the Mars Barn does not have to accommodate human visitors, the facility is easy to manage, and can provide its experience equally well to any school or institution in the country (and the world!), with only the operating crew on site.

In short, the Mars Barn consists of a rough Mars analog landscape with various obstacles, a delayed communication link, and a set of rules that specify a standard "hands-off" procedure for sending a robotic "lander" into the environment and operating it there.