Hunab Ku| Breakthrough
Breakthrough
Journey to the Stars
Summary
Journey to the Stars is an interactive web app that will allow you to explore the scientific and technological advances that will allow humanity to achieve interstellar travel through different space missions. Manage your resources wisely to unlock new technologies and missions that will bring you ever closer to the stars.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We developed an interactive web app that allows the user to learn about future technologies and space missions that lie ahead in our road to interstellar travel. Through resource management, the user will be able to unlock new missions and technologies that will bring them one step closer to their goal in this Journey to the Stars.
It's important to create awareness of the current and future propulsion technologies and, more importantly, the need for new and innovative ways to propel spacecraft and revolutionize how we humans explore space. Journey to the Stars hopes to showcase current and theoretical spacecraft propulsion technologies in an engaging way. We want to get more people to dream about new ways of space travel and believe that anything is possible through science.
How We Developed This Project
When the challenges were published, we knew we wanted a creative project. We read through the different challenges and their descriptions and this one, Breakthrough, piqued our interest immediately. Not only did it look very interesting, but an idea immediately was born. It meshed perfectly with our combined skill set and everyone was extremely excited to work on this project.
We decided to choose a game format that we would be able to finish by the end of the weekend. We decided to create an interactive web app focused on resource management and keep a relatively clean and simple interface, free of animations, in order to meet the deadline. For inspiration, we turned to our favorite sci-fi and space video games and Youtube videos, as well as the amazing image galleries of NASA. After a restructured plan was approved by the team, the web app was built using Javascript, HTML, Git, and VS code.
Although we had experience programming, we've never made a game structure with Javascript before. In turn, we encountered and solved a lot of small problems along the way, since we were learning as we went. We're very happy with the result and everything we learned along the way.
Journey to the Stars is now live here:
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We browsed through NASA's image galleries when looking for inspiration, especially those from Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Our favorites helped us choose space missions and are featured in the web app. You can find a link to all the beautiful images that inspired us in the Data & Resources section down below.
Project Demo
Data & Resources
ESA/Hubble & NASA. (2016). Astronomy Picture of the Day [Image]. Retrieved from https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160118.html
NASA. (2011). Astronomy Picture of the Day [Image]. Retrieved from https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110128.html
NASA/ JHU's APL/ SwRI/ Thomas Appéré. (2019). Astronomy Picture of the Day [Image]. Retrieved from https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190129.html
NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics. (2013). You Can Bartok the Talk, But Can You Barwok the Walk? [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/messenger/multimedia/messenger_orbit_image20130514_1.html
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ. (2015). Rock Spire in 'Spirit of St. Louis Crater' on Mars [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/mer/pia19393/rock-spire-in-spirit-of-st-louis-crater-on-mars
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute. (2014). Europa's Stunning Surface [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/europas-stunning-surface
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute. (2013). Dusk in the South [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA17177
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill. (2018). Jovian Cloudscape [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA22931
NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA. (2017). Occator and Ahuna [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA11240
Tarantula Nebula Spitzer 2-Color Image. (2020). NASA/JPL-Caltech [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA23646
Zdeněk Bardon/ESO. (2017). More Images of Alpha Centauri [Image]. Retrieved from https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2018/alphacen/more.html