EMA Space| Space Exploration in Your Backyard
Space Exploration in Your Backyard
Connecting with the starts
Summary
We began our project by creating and sharing a survey about the populations knowledge on space related topics in our institutions Instagram, due to the results of this survey we came to the conclusion that the creation of a medium to connect the population to these places is needed.We began by creating a web page in which one can find everything they need to know about the study of space in Uruguay.Furthermore, we developed a personal assistant as a tool to further help an individual discover what these organizations are dedicated to, named Apollo, the assistant is able to receive questions related to the study of space in general and narrow down what might interest the individual best.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our project consists on creating means of informing the general population about the space and astronomy fields in our country, reaching every age, social sector and location in our country, especially those who live in the most remote areas.
Taking advantage of the widespread use of social media, and the World Wide Web, Instagram would allow us to spread information in a simple way with no need for advanced programming knowledge.
We created a webpage that allow people to get in contact with different organizations dedicated to astronomy and the space field in Uruguay. Apart from that it has information and interesting facts related to the field in order to inform and capture the attention of the public.
We would like our project to grow as more people get in contact with us and share their projects and investigations. As a start point we started to research about the efforts in rocketry and the astronomy studies at a national level in order to centralize them in a medium accessible to the general public.
We pretend to use the Escuala Miltar de Aeronautica Instagram, which is already popular, in order to popularize the Instagram of our project. In relation with this we would create short videos in order to transmit the information in a more attractive and didactic way. Both the webpage and the Instagram would allow local scientists and aficionados to share their works and studies with whole world. Bringing to everyone the possibility to access this information, and get involved if they want.
During the development of this project, people who were interesting in sharing their astronomy publications, like Astrotourism of Uruguay, got in conctact with us. Astroturism of Uruguay has a webpage and a Youtube channel dedicated to space news from all around the world.
How We Developed This Project
In our country we are taught from a young age that if we want to do great things, we have to work very hard, this applies to whatever area we decide to work on due to the small size, reduced population or lack of economic resources.
Despite this, as a nation we have demonstrated that this is not a problem, we have been always been able to reach our goals through cunning ways. This way of working has been greatly applied to the area of space and science development due in part to the fact that the resources needed to perform an investigation or experiment with international grade standards are very high.
The lack of these resources isn’t an excuse for us not to continue studying and investigating day to day at a global level, being able at times to provide humanity with results to further advance as a whole.
A prime example of our spirit and curiosity for the study of space is the number of people per capital who have signed up for this years NASA Space Apps Challenge is the highest in South America, despite being one of the smallest countries in the continent.
To have a better understanding of the situation of our country’s population is having nowadays regarding the acquisition of information related to space and which associations, institutions and organizations are dedicated to the investigation of this field as well as the events and studies carried on by them in our country, we decided to create and share a survey on our institutions (the Escuela Militar de Aeronáutica) Instagram, results showed us that the public in general doesn’t know about the organizations previously mentioned, which is a very serious matter.
This is why we have decided to base our project in the solution to this problem, our objective is to create a means to connect all of these organizations in a virtual place so that the public can discover them in a fast and efficient way without the need of making a large investment, this can also be applied to other country’s with who have the same issue as Uruguay.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
As a basis for our project we’ve decided to use two resources from the NASA
The first one is the program EPSCoR used by the NASA for the competitive stimulation, despite the fact that we don’t have the resources necessary to generate economics as a result of our investigation, we have centered oh the idea of motivating the education and curiosity of an individual by providing access to space related study’s.
We have also taken as a reference the methodology that the NASA uses with different organisms with the end goal of interacting and obtaining ideas and resources for a common cause, thus unifying all entities in a singles place (our red) and allowing organizations from our country the ability to further contribute with their own ideas in the future.
We have also developed a personal assistant that makes the discovery of these organizations easier, this was possible thanks to the help and resources provided to us by IBM and their program “Watson Assistant”, we have given our assistant, named Apollo, the ability to be questioned about space related topics in the event that an individual doesn’t know where to begin searching, whether it be the area of rocket science, laws related to space, astronomy, etc.
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SkTAj71R7_Y4dSuAD5CPBnSB_nEM-eMd/view?usp=sharing
Project Code
Data & Resources
We did a survey in the EMA Instagram in order to have a better knowlege of the actual situation in space exploration information in our country. we did the following questions:
Did you know about the existance of CIDA-E?
No 573 (64%)
Yes 317 (36%)
Have uruguayans the possibility to acces to information related with space?
Yes 236 (29%)
No 573 (71%)
Did you know that the fist portable computers were used by NASA?
No 501 (58%)
Yes 363 (42%)
Due to our lack of knowledge about HTML coding we used Wix to create our webpage