High-Level Project Summary
We developed an interactive newspaper that would be visually appealing whilst being informative. Each of the sections and components of the newspaper addresses the challenge of turning NASA’s Earth Observing missions, and the information found on their resources, into a digestible multimedia depiction of the progress made through time. The main objective we focused on was ensuring that the interface would catch the eye of both older, and younger audiences. The more public engagement created, the more support scientific research will get in the future; whether it is through inspiring an older audience to donate funds, or a younger audience to pursue a career in the field of science.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The main objective we focused on was ensuring that the interface would catch the eye of both older, and younger audiences. Our project shows the history of NASA's Earth Observing Missions in a time-line that has intervals of 15 years in each sub-division of a virtual newspaper. This newspaper is divided into six different sections. Four of those sections include an interactive time-line on which the user can read about what satellites were used and their respective important information in a chronological order. The fifth section is an entertainment category in which the user can read riddles and solve puzzles that are related to the information shown in previous sections. The last section shows the instruments that were used in each mission and it also shows the pictures that the satellites captured when they were in space chronologically. The user would click on the section that they would like to see and the virtual newspaper would take them there. The benefits this application would have is that it is an interactive learning tool that all ages can use. It also presents the information in a way that is innovative and interesting for the user.
Space Agency Data
This project is composed mainly of NASA data, specifically from NASA's Earth Observing System. The function of this data was to mention key information about each of the satellites. The website has a small timeline below the page's logo that was useful for locating each satellite rapidly on time and their detailed information. The detailed information included the launch date, launch location, the orbital location, how long it operated, the main objectives, the key partners that helped to achieve the mission, and the instruments that composed the satellite. However, for almost every satellite, the information related to some of the earlier-mentioned categories was missing.
For this reason, it was necessary to look for that information on other websites. Hopefully, on the same webpage, there were links related to each mission where the missing information was found. Those links include NASA Science | Share the Science, ESA, Goddard Space Flight Center, and others. Another type of data used was images. Images helped the reader understand better what the satellite was like and its history. The images were extracted from websites such as NASA.gov and Internet Archive.
As a team, we believe that this process of collecting data genuinely challenged our critical thinking skills. While collecting data, we comprehended that it was necessary to create an interactive and better-organized way to understand the history and evolution of NASA satellites.
Hackathon Journey
The NASA Space Apps challenge has been an intriguing and exploratory experience, from selecting the challenge we want to solve until submitting the result. This challenge has an unforgettable experience for our teammates and a learning one since we learned that with cooperation and communication, we are stronger and that NASA's long history of watching us from space has a significant impact on today's society. Therefore, more people, including younger audiences, must know about this historical advance. Our team is composed of STEM students driven by the advancement in technology. This challenge allows us to illustrate interactively how NASA's instrument and mission had evolved over long years of exploring earth from space. Our interactive timeline includes NASA'S earliest and recent missions. Our approach was to look for something informative and creative simultaneously. Therefore, we created an interactive newspaper. This online newspaper is simple because we want young audiences to learn how to use it. However, it is as interesting for older audiences. Our greatest challenge was to put the information together on the same site. However, we managed to organize ourselves by having conversations, distributing tasks, and helping each other.
References
SATELLITE'S INFORMATION:
NASA. (2012, November 26). All missions. NASA. Retrieved October 9, 2022, from https://eospso.nasa.gov/content/all-missions
NASA. (2022, October 9). NASA Science Missions. NASA. Retrieved October 9, 2022, from https://science.nasa.gov/missions-page field_division_tid=103&field_phase_tid=All
ALL GIFS COME FROM:
https://giphy.com/
IMAGES:
All images were taken from the NASA website
https://www.nasa.gov/