Delta Rays

https://github.com/bvpav/delta-rays

https://delta-rays.vercel.app/

Overview

Delta Rays is a web-based educational quiz game about the James Webb Space Telescope.

It aims to showcase the latest scientific advancements by comparing pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope to pictures taken by other telescopes.

Gameplay

Players are shown 2 or 3 images of space and only one of them is taken by Webb. The player must find it and select it. If they answer correctly, they are rewarded a point.

At the end of the game, the player may share their score on Twitter, urging others to try to beat their score on the exact same quiz.

The game has 3 difficulty levels:

Easy

• 5 questions, 2 images each
• only 1 image per question is from JWST

Medium

• 10 questions, 3 images each
• only 1 image per question is from JWST

Hard

• 10 questions, 3 images each
• some questions may have no images from JWST

Mission

We understand the importance of proper communication of scientific improvements in modern society. Our mission is to help contribute to the communication and demonstrate its significance.

Used tools

The web application uses modern web technologies

• Vite - module bundling and developer tooling
• React - interactive user experience
• Tailwind CSS - UI styles
• Typescript - simplified developer experience
• tRPC - typesafe API
• Vercel - serverless deployment

The Space Agency Data used in this project consists of various images taken by the JWST used in the quiz.

We came in this year's NASA Space Apps Challenge with very little time on our hands and we were looking for a good challenge that we can complete in that time span, whilst having the largest impact. We felt that this one was just perfect. It was initially intended that we used the images provided by the api provided by NASA, but it turned out that they we're mostly black and white .fits images that weren't aesthetically pleasing or easy to use. This taught us about how telescopes take space images as well as phenomena like redshifting, however it was still a setback as we couldn't use the .fits images that the api was providing. Publicly available long exposure/broadband images were used instead, as they are what most people think of when they hear about images of space.

For Hubble and Spitzer images we used NASA's image library:

• https://images.nasa.gov/

For James Webb Space Telescope images we used STSCI's JWST image gallery:

• https://webbtelescope.org/

For additional images we used the following websites:

• https://astronomy.com/
• https://esawebb.org/

#webapp #quiz #telescope #JWST #JamesWebb