Academic Honesty| Space Exploration in Your Backyard
Awards & Nominations
Academic Honesty has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Space Exploration in Your Backyard
Space Nearby
Summary
The general public is largely unaware of the impact that the space sector has on their day to day lives. Breakthroughs happen every day and we are looking to bridge the gap between the public and the space industry. Space Nearby is centered around being visually appealing to get users as excited about the world of space research and exploration as we are. People will use our website to find important space related landmarks and locations in their area and become more informed about how space impacts them - right in their own backyard!
How We Addressed This Challenge
The challenge that we took on was 'Space exploration in your backyard'. The challenge proposed was to find a way to spread information about space and space-related facilities to the mass public. This is very important, since space research & knowledge is often regarded as an elite topic by the general public. Our web app, 'SpaceNearby', allows users to discover space facilities and organizations that are near their location (or any other location). The user can specify a location, as well as a search radius. Once selected, the user is given a list of space-related places presented on a embedded Google Maps map, allowing them to get a better understanding of the space-related facilities that are in their vicinity. This is extremely important, since much of the public is under-informed when it comes to the work that goes on in the space industry. Additionally, one of the biggest challenges that the space industry faces is its limited funding. By spreading awareness about space work, our app can help taxpayers be more comfortable with supporting the space industry through government funding. In the future, we hope to continue optimizing our search technology by integrating datasets to improve our app's performance.
How We Developed This Project
One of the reasons we chose this challenge was that it was an opportunity to provide change to the community, given the nature of the challenge is meant to make finding space agencies easier in your local community. We all love astronomy, and encouraging other people to get in touch with their local "space" organizations felt great. Another reason was that we saw it was a feasible idea given our web development skillset. Our approach was to split up our roles and work on individual components, as well as help each other out often. We used HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as our languages, Express.js and React.js as our JavaScript frameworks, Node.js as the JavaScript environment, Git for sharing files with each other, and Heroku for deploying the web application. We had many problems using React since we were quite novice with it, along with the Google API which we felt did not have sufficient documentation or support.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
The NASA data that we used most and plan to use further is the NASA api(https://api.nasa.gov/). This API was used to pull photographs released by NASA of some of the wonders of space to add to the design of the site. Our future plans for this api are to retrieve location data on satellites and unidentified objects in relation to users. Although not implemented yet, we have plans to integrate official Canadian space agency data (https://www4.asc-csa.gc.ca/RSC-CSD/eng/space) to dramatically increase the number of true positive hits from our search function. As of now, we rely solely on a set of specific space-agency keywords to identify nearby institutions, but with the help of agency data, we'll be able to pick up locations with unrelated names and vastly
increase the results of a given search.
Project Demo
https://github.com/bentvelj/SpaceApps2020/tree/main/screenshots
Project Code
Data & Resources
https://api.nasa.gov/
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/embed/get-started
https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/overview