Awards & Nominations
Team Polaris has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
Polaris
High-Level Project Summary
Polaris is a toolset that incorporates many fascinating features for students and space enthusiasts to learn more about the fascinating birth and violent death of stars. Putting huge emphasis on variable starsWe prepared a mini curriculum for variable stars on the website that includes a mini slide show depicting life cycle of stars and a Pop-Up Quiz!We used VR technology and created a spaceship museum to introduce people to variable stars and differentiate between its types in an interactive way.We used AI Technology to predict the type of star according to its light curve observations.We also have a mini mobile game that rewards the user with information about variable stars each level
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Polaris is a toolset that contains many interesting features to help people know more about variable stars.
We have a website which acts as the main landing page of our project. It contains the mini curriculum prepared by us as well a pop quiz to test the user's knowledge of what he had learned. It also links all the other tools like VR, AI Models and mini mobile game. We developed our website using wix which is a website building and hosting platform. We also wrote a small, animated story on our website to get people more interested in the dynamics of space. 
created a VR Museum for the users to get more involved and interact with the fascinating life cycle of stars and the various types of variable stars, the museum is modeled as a travelling spaceship with many diagrams and 3D models of stars, planets, asteroids and spaceships floating around in the vast space. It displays the information inside the ship interactively so it would make the experience more engaging for the user. We used Unity3D to 3D model our assets and used ALTSpaceVR to host our VR assets.
We harnessed the power of AI and created two machine learning models. First one tries to guess from multiple inputs if the observed star is a pulsar or not, and the other classifies stars according to its stage in life.
We developed a retro-styled mini game called Jupiter Jazz that is similar to the famous childhood game Space Invaders. after clearing all the enemies and advancing to the next level it gives the user a piece of information about variable stars. We are using this mobile game to target young students and kids, because it is interactive and fun. 
Space Agency Data
We used NASA resources to learn about the types of variable stars, light curves and how they determined the type of a variable star.
We learnt about Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) functions and capabilities but what really fascinated us was lightkurve python package. It made exploring data gathered from the satellite so easy to visualize and understand. After Tinkering with it, it inspired us to create our AI prediction models.
Hackathon Journey
It was our first time joining a hackathon for all of us, we started really working and feeling under pressure after two or three hours, everybody was busy doing something. We learnt many valuable information about the universe and stars, after reading and researching most of us were fascinated about the scale of our universe.
Everybody loves stars, those mystical bodies that light up our night sky and guide us in the darkest of nights, our team seized this opportunity to learn more about their variability and types. We chose to work in parallel mode and each individual should focus on working on a feature. we resolved setbacks and challenges by reading and doing so much researching and OfCourse googling.