Space Pioneers

Universal Event | Nimbus to Now: The History of NASA’s Earth-Observing Missions

A Spacecraft's journey

High-Level Project Summary

Looking through a seemingly endless list of objects on a website can be overwhelming. We feared that valuable historical data would be lost due to the reader´s discouragement. In response, we created A Spacecraft's Journey, a learning tool where we gathered information about NASA's spacecraft history and condensed it into its key points to showcase NASA's technological and satellite-evolving history. This way anyone who wishes to grow their knowledge of spacecraft history can easily access it. Moreover, all data contained in the portal, comes from three different space websites, meaning that the learner would look at only one website, learn the key points, and be done with their research.

Link to Final Project

https://pr.to/WR9VNL/

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bBT1A_ryvEAJ3SMyuTID46qHSKmTzmEY?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

A Spacecraftt's Journey is an interactive website where anyone can access the history of physical and technological advancements of NASA’s spacecrafts throughout the years. The website was made to be engaging so that anyone can navigate and take interest in it. We also designed the webpage in an organized way so that learners cannot get lost in loads of information. Therefore, learners can organize the presented information according to the satellite'´s name(alphabetical order), the satellite's launch date (chronologically), the satellite's launch date by decade, or according to what information they want. The web page will use a filter system to organize the information obtained from our Excel spreadsheet according to the Learner’s given command. Users will also be able to report any faulty system or link. A Spacecraft's journey gathered data from three to four space-related sources to ensure the learner receives precise, accurate, reliable, and complete information. This way, the learner will not have to spend hours gathering information, he could go to this website and navigate it accordingly.

We made this website to make Space-related data fun and understandable. We hope that children, college students, experts, and space amateurs alike, can obtain what they are looking for regarding the history of NASA’s spacecrafts through our website. We hope that learners can easily navigate this website without putting too much time or effort.

We used Proto.io to “sketch” how our website would function. We could not finish the project due to time and personnel restrictions. Nevertheless, we proportioned a model of how the website should work and its basis.

Space Agency Data

NASA’s data on Satellite missions was the basis of our project. We used ESA’s satellite data along with NASA’s data to create the data basis for our website. We researched each satellite’s history on those websites. We used NASA’s Earth Observing System page to make a list of the satellites and determine about half of the needed information on each satellite. We also used the NASA science page to provide us with more insight about certain satellites, including Aquarius, CALIPSO, and CloudSat. Finally, we used ESA’s satellite data to cite and analyze additional resources wherever we were missing any. We used this compiled data to form the Excel Spreadsheet that is the basis of our webpage. It includes every relevant fact about any satellite.

Hackathon Journey

Hackathon 2022 was a big challenge for us. We learned how to work as a team and push through hardships regardless of how difficult they can be. This challenge was quite difficult for us to tackle because it was out of our areas of expertise. Nevertheless, we decided to dedicate our time and effort to it, because we wanted to be challenged and have fun with it. As a result, we learned many interesting facts regarding the technological developments of NASA's spacecrafts through time. Throughout our journey, we were conscious that our project would probably not be the most technologically advanced or the most well-developed because we were only two people working on something that none of us had worked on so extensively before. Therefore, we decided to make the project formal, show the interest, time, and dedication we put into it, and have fun while doing it. Having an open mindset helped us to continue through rough paths because we knew we were not doing this challenge solely for the competition; we were doing this to gain experience and learn.

To ensure a smooth project without miscommunication, we met three times a day to discuss our advances, encourage one another to keep going and solve any doubts or problems we might have encountered while doing our individual work. Teamwork made the dream work. Communication ensured a fast-going problem solution technique.

We decided to tackle this challenge because we wanted to make a web source where people of all ages could easily find information regarding the history of NASA’s spacecraft. We also wanted to make an engaging and organized website where even children could learn something from the pictures, while adults could look at one website and be satisfied with their search.