On February 16 and 17 the second SPEC meeting of VaMEx3 took place at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. In total about 20 people participated in the meeting. Michael Schleiss presented a rough mission concept on Mars. The vision is to cover an area of approx. 14km x 14km on Mars to explore and map as well as to perform in smaller regions of interest such as drilling and sampling. to be carried out.

The key outcome of the SPEC meeting is a rough schedule of the VaMEx3 final presentation. Responsible project participants were also assigned to the major hardware and software components so that everyone should know what to do next. Furthermore, the project partners from Anavs, Aerospace Information Technology – University of Würzburg and TUM presented their swarm participants. In addition, the VaMEx3 Virtual Test Bed (VTB) was presented, which will be used to simulate the Mars mission. The VTB combines Unreal Engine 5 and ROS2 communication. In the near future, each project partner has to define requirements for the VTB in order to implement a simulation as realistic as possible.

Another important point was the presentation of possible test areas for the VaMEx3 demonstration. Volker Klein presented different areas in Germany, whereby these should have good accessibility and infrastructure. The focus is on regions of open pit coal mining due to the similarity to the surface of Mars. By fall 2023, further information will be obtained for the regions Garzweiler, Groitscher Dreieck, Lausitz and Eifel.