NymLabs| Space Exploration in Your Backyard

Space Exploration in Your Backyard

The work of space exploration (and the societal benefits it brings) permeates every location and facet of society. Your challenge is to create a visual representation of the breadth of the space sector’s influence, showing the network of organizations and locations associated with the work of space exploration.

NymLabs | Space Development Everywhere

Summary

Startups and academic projects play a fundamental role in the transfer of space technologies to the economic branches of daily life. Unfortunately, in countries like Colombia, the absence of a common space technology environment results in a scattered field of action.NymLabs is a Social Network for space projects, an ideal platform to make new contacts and collaborations. Here you can meet new projects, create them, or request working on them. Keep updated with the projects you most like, and discover new ones every day. Nymlabs holds a significant number of resources at your disposal. Additionally, Local businesses could display their services through catalog services.

How We Addressed This Challenge

NymLabs addresses the ‘Connect - Space Exploration in Your Backyard’ challenge by identifying deficiencies and their causes on the network of people and organizations working in space technologies in Latin America, especially in Colombia. NymLabs try to approach the next weaknesses:




  • Ignorance of groups working on space developments.
  • Low visibility of space organizations and projects 
  • Redundant efforts without collaboration due to ignorance of the existence of outside projects.
  • Absence of consulting groups.
  • Knowledge scattered within groups of the same region.


Some of the causes identified are:




  • Absence of a centralized database of organizations working in space developments.
  • Absence of a centralized database of space developments projects.
  • Weak connection between local qualified business and project managers.
  • Absence of regional knowledge databases.
  • Ignorance of available resources (Local and Global)


NymLabs looks to relieve these weaknesses by developing a web-app based on a Social Network for projects. This solution comes with:




  • Creation of a regional network of space technology projects, including academic and business developments.
  • Creation of a regional Network of people involved in space technology projects.
  • Visibility of local qualified businesses who can help with the project developments.
  • Gathering, verifying and classification of useful information about global services and products (especially focused in Open Data Sets from Space Agencies)
  • Creation of a virtual spot for the sharing of knowledge within the space community.


In more detailed words, NymLabs is a web-app that aims to boost the emergence of new space technology ventures from promoting collaborative work and visibility of space projects in addition to the access to local and international resources and services. 


Any person or organization interested in developing, collaborating, or enrolling in a project could create an account and either add a new project or request to work on another project. All the projects will be visible and categorized in web-app. The users could follow all the projects or tags of their interest. Project leaders looking to onboard new people could access selected user profiles that fit the project requirements. Project members will have access to a service catalog, where they can find local services, great services, and support materials. Local businesses could display their services through catalog services. Large services and resources, such as NASA Open Data Sets or AWS Cloud Platforms, will also show up in the Service Catalog.


The platform is intended to be used by independent researchers, research groups, startups, companies, educational institutions, professionals, environmental protection agencies, and many others. People would start by creating a personal account, in which person account users can create and manage organization and project accounts, generate participation requests, track projects of interest, and access a personalized service catalog. As a result of these facilities, collaborative work within the projects and their visibility will be promoted, as well as the strengthening of existing companies that provide services and products.


The web-app is divided into 4 sections, Projects, Feed, Services Catalog and My account. Each one of these sections are described in detai on our respository.


How We Developed This Project

In NymLabs, we all are developers and the majority of the team has experiences in space technology developments, going from research until the creation of startups.

Every time we start a new project, we find just in front of us, the wall of the no-documentation, it is not easy to build a regional state of art and, consequently, look for a possible collaboration. Through the assistance and organization of regional events, we had the chance to realize the great number of people and teams who are working in space developments. However, we have also noted that they share our same issues about the absence of an updated and integrated central database or platform.


We firmly believe that the creation of this platform will improve and consolidate the space technology teams' network, resulting in more collaborations and sharing of knowledge. We are also convinced that the promotion of local qualified services and products will reinforce and take to the next level the space technology working.


In order to promote the sharing of information, we think that as creators of this platform we need to walk the first step, that is why we will gather and classify valuable resources from space agencies (Just like Open Datasets) and finally put it to the disposal of the community, trying to make easier the first steps on the arising of new ventures.


For the design phase was done an exploration of some of the Open Data Sets from NASA. For this was used Jupyter Notebooks in order to get some datasets. 


The images of the Mockup were designed using Illustrator and they were animated using the online tool proto.io.


For the audio of the speech on the video was used the tool Text to Speech from IBM. The edition of the video was done by using Adobe Premiere.


During the hackathon, the group successfully builds an illustrative mockup, where the main functionalities of the platform are effectively displayed. This Mockup could be found in our repository. Because of time the examples on the app are just illustrative, and not correspond to real data.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

When we looked at the possibilities for improvement based on the different categories of the SpaceApps Challenge, we decided that one of the best things we could do was to centralize and engage all those resources and make them more accessible to developers at a wide range of levels.


Our goal is for our work to have this data available as one of the engines of the application, since our idea is based on joining all efforts as far as possible, we plan to have a catalog of useful resources that the user would probably need to have a successful result. Taking into account that space is the central axis of the projects published on the platform, the data from space agencies will be the most important to which people will have access.


For the testings we use the fowllowing APSs:




  • APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day
  • Mars Rover Photos
  • Earth
Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
Tags
#Connect, #Projects, #Entrepreneurship, #Collavorative Working, #Community, #People Network, #Projects Network, #Startups #Sharing
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.