Exploration - Space Apps Challenge

Exploration| Can You Hear Me Now?

Can You Hear Me Now?

Human missions to Mars are moving from the realm of science fiction to science fact. Your challenge is to design an interactive application to explore the challenge of communicating with astronauts on Mars from Earth.

Connecting Mars

Summary

The distance of from Earth to Mars is 54.6 million kilometers. That's a lot of distance that needs to be covered in order to transmit data and it's not always easy!To show users the complications that can happen when communicating to and from Mars we've decided to create a fun game that shows the advantages and disadvantages of the using the different kinds of satellites.Visit our page to learn more about our project: https://divyabfalcon.wixsite.com/spacecomms

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a fun and interactive game for children of all ages to used so that they can better understand the challenges that scientists are constantly facing. We hope that this will inspire future generations to tackle this on going problem in order to make space travel faster, cheaper, and safer. Our app lets the user determine how they wish to solve the problem of communication through radio waves, a neutrino beam, or through a StarLink fleet. Once the user chooses how to solve the communication problem they are taken to the respective game page, to make the communication between Mars and Earth possible by moving around satellites.

How We Developed This Project

We were inspired to choose this challenge because we all found it intriguing and felt that it was essential to fix the problems of interplanetary communication. We first researched how NASA and other agencies are using satellites to communicate, and looked into faster and cheaper methods of interplanetary communication from other companies such as SpaceX (StarLink). We used code.org (which used JavaScript), codeshare.io (which is like Google Docs for code) and MiroBoard (a collaborative online whiteboard where we all shared our ideas). Though none of us had much experience on the subject, we were able to attain it with a lot of research. We also ran into a brick wall while trying to figure out how to develop the program all at once, but we were able to find CodeShare and code.org, which really helped us collaborate on it. Overall, we were very efficient in collaborating and switching between designing and testing our game, catering to the skill levels of everyone in the group.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used space agency data from NASA in order to learn how communication with satellites worked as none of us had much knowledge about this topic before hand. We analyzed the data from the given agencies including how and why they used their respective satellites in order to showcase the different ways the problem of communicating with Mars could be solved.

Project Demo

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jHxpJOvHBt0hzeRTo9CVBc193yzfYdZg/view?usp=sharing

To view the code: Click on the link in the share your code submission box(you should see the actual game when you open it), then click "View Code" on the top right of the screen. Once the code loads there is another button on the top right of the screen called "Show Text" please click that.