High-Level Project Summary
Our team, Stardust, decided to take the challenge of creating a multimedia platform that exhibit the history of NASA’s Earth Observing missions. To solve it, we developed a website simulating a museum where users could explore and see some NASA’s missions inside frames on the walls, ordered by chronological time. This way, all people around the world could see, in a dynamic and funny way, the evolution of the missions technologically, with the additions of many new features, and how it changes to attend to science needs along the time. With this, we hope that science could reach all people, regardless of educational level, making desinformation about the universe doesn't spread anymore.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Importance of the project:
Even nowadays, there are still people that believe Earth is flat. This shows us that scientific dissemination has not been efficient. So it’s very important to create easy ways to consume scientific content. That’s where our project takes place. We hope to work on this information propagation so people of whatever age or knowledge level can learn about NASA’s Earth-observation missions
The idea:
We had the idea to develop a user-friendly interface that simulates a museum which is divided in decades that represents the sections of it. It starts from 1960, the year when TIROS was launched, up until 2027, when JPSS-3 is planned to be launched.
In each section, the missions are organized chronologically, from the oldests missions to the most recent ones.
How we made it:
In order to develop the project, we created a website using front-end technologies, more specifically HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.
When entering the site, the user first sees a Home Page, in which there is a button to Explore the museum. At the top of each page, there is a navigation bar, in which there are three options. The first option is to go back to the Home Page. The second one is a selection of which decade the user wants to visit. And the third option is a tutorial page so the user can know exactly what is possible to do.
Using Figma to develop the design of the website and the sites made available by NASA in the ‘Resources’ page as references, we were able to build a user-friendly interface that allows the user to navigate through the missions from NASA and know more about how the technologies and expeditions have evolved.
Github:
Space Agency Data
We used the data available on Nasa’s Earth Observing System website to organize the missions in a chronological way and display the information about each launch as date of launch, purpose and status.
Hackathon Journey
At the beginning, we were very excited to make this project. We chose the challenge 'Nimbus to now' because we were very interested in learning about the evolution of space missions and, in particular, how it could impact our lives here on Earth. So, we started to make plans, searchings, and as every teamwork, also started to appear disagreements and discussions about what we would do. Initially, we didn't know how to deal with it, which took a precious time from us. Some people couldn't dedicate the necessary time to the project and others were confused with the chaos of discussions. We were totally lost. But, along the first day, we could organize our team and finally we were able to actually do something. Even with the setbacks of the first day, we didn't give up. We knew we needed to give it our all on the second day to recover from the last one. So that's what we did. But this time, we did it right. We separated one main task for each member of the group, who was responsible for its completion. What resulted in a higher productivity and made the conclusion of our project possible.
Even though this was the first Hackathon for every group member, the experience was amazing, since we were able to learn a lot about Nasa's history of Earth observing missions, but mainly because we were able to learn a lot from ourselves about teamwork and how it could be hard.
Even with the amount of problems shown, the tiredness and the effort needed, we could learn from our mistakes and get even more prepared for the next Hackathon. So we would like to thank Nasa for this wonderful experience and unique opportunity to learn more about astronomy, history, teamwork and the most important, ourselves.
References
Images:
- https://cdn.britannica.com/51/194651-050-747F0C18/Interior-National-Gallery-of-Art-Washington-DC.jpg?w=400&h=300&c=crop
- https://eospso.nasa.gov/content/all-missions
- www.nasa.gov
Used in the Video:
Websites:
- https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/marine-observation-satellite
- https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/geodetic-satellite
- https://science.nasa.gov/missions/erbs
- https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/nimbus-1
- https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/nimbus-2
- https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/nimbus-3
- https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/applications-technology-satellite
- https://eospso.nasa.gov/missions/television-infrared-observation-satellite-program
Tags
#space, #launch, #history, #satellite, #NASAmissions