Zathura Spacers| Space Exploration in Your Backyard
Space Exploration in Your Backyard
Zathura Spacers: An automated platform to consolidate Space-related information of Central America
Summary
Zathura Spacers is a platform that automatically consolidates space information from countries in Central America in a standardized and user-friendly format. This platform will allow more exposure of space information of any kind, be it: activities, accomplishments, developments, etc; from different institutes, universities, organizations, or other sources that normally can’t publicize their activities, new discoveries, and developments.This platform will be able to connect to several sources (social networks, websites, events pages, etc) with the purpose of collecting space information and centralize it in the same place.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Challenge (Current Situation):
The Challenge's states that the influence of the Space sector reaches every location and facet of the human society, with a global-scale impact.
However, the information about the Space worldwide impact is so widely spread in different sites and plaftorms, that only traditional players are often recognized, leaving the initiatives from small institutions, communities and less-experienced countries with little chance to showcase their work in Space in a global context.
Furthermore, the lack of consolidated Space information makes it even harder for the users to realize about the small initiatives that are happening in Regions such as Central America, as shown in the picture below:
Zathura Spacers Proposal (Consolidated Platform)
Our project Zathura Spacers aims to centralize the Space-Information of countries in Central America in a standardized and user-friendly format, in order to increase awareness of space activities in this region to the broader space community.
Information Flow:
Zathura Spacers platform will admit the input of information from the space actors in each country of Central America, especially the so called "backyard" space developers (small-institutions, research groups, schools, etc). This information will be automatically formatted to the Zathura Spacers standard and fine-tuned by the Zathura Spacers information managers.
Zathura Spacers plaftorm will also use artificial intelligence to automatically extract space-related information from social networks, event pages, government/agencies websites, universities, institutions and companies in Central America, and transform it into Zathura Spacers format.
With this automatically-consolidated Space-information platform, we hope we can provide a capacity-building tool for "backyard" developers of Central America to showcase their Space activities to the Global community, strengthening the region's position in the #NewSpace industry.
How We Developed This Project
What inspired our team:
In the recent years, the Central America region has experienced a growing number in activities and accomplishments in the Space Sector, such as the creation of the The Central American Association for Aeronautics and Space (ACAE) in Costa Rica, CubeSat mission in Costa Rica (Irazu-1) and Guatemala (Quetzal-1), conferences and open-courses of Introduction to Space Engineering by the Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC), proposal of a Central American Space Agency by the Central American Integration System (SICA) among others.
Even thought it is noticeable that the Central American region is flourishing in Space capabilities, there is no consolidated source of information for space activities within this specific region.
The Challenge Space Exploration in your backyard, is giving us the opportunity to address this issue by creating a platform to showcase the Central American activities in a consolidated and standardized manner.
Approach:
Our methodology consisted in three phases:
1-Analysis Phase:
We analyzed how accessible is the Space information in Central America by searching websites, research papers, social networks and others.
We realized that the amount of information is big, but not easy accessible and not standardized even at a country-level, let alone at a regional-level.
This phase also proved that small developers, small institutions don't have access to showcase their work.
2- Proposal Design
Once the current situation was analyzed and understood, we decide to schematize a solution to improve the current situation: An automatic consolidation of Space Information platform was required. That's how Zathura Spacers was created.
3- Platform Creation
Due to the fast pace of the SpaceApp Challenge, we decided to go with an easy-to-use tool for Website Creation: WordPress.
The following Website has been developed: zathura.info
The following app was created using PowerApps:
Milestone#1:
This website will initially receive inputs from the Information Managers about Space development in each country of Central America. (Achieved)
Milestone#2:
Creation of user-access for people in Central America to input their Space local Activities.(Achieved)
Milestone#3:
Automatic formatting of information into the Zathura Spacers standard. (Achieved)
Milestone#4:
Creation of an algorithm to monitor several sources in all 7 countries in Central America (websites, social networks, event pages) and extract up-to date Space Activities. (to be Acheived)
Even though our team has the experience of developing such solutions, we have stopped the development in this platform due to time-constrain, but will plan to finish the solution in a 3-month period.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We have reviewed the SBIR/STTR Database in order to understand how NASA support small business initiatives by providing potential sources of seed funding for the development of their innovations.
In a sense, Zathura Spacers also offers small-businesses and institutions a platform for showcasing their initiatives with potential to find global partners.
Project Demo
https://www.dropbox.com/s/84xpm7jycbgirrg/Zathura%20Project%20Presentation%28FINAL%29.pptx?dl=0
Project Code
Data & Resources
- NASA Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)/Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Database
- Asociación Centroamericana de Aeronáutica y del Espacio www.acae-ca.org