Awards & Nominations

SPIRIT has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Local Peoples' Choice Winner

Breakthrough

Faster-than-light travel is the key to humanity’s dreams of inter-galactic space travel. Your challenge is to create an app, tool, game, or other interactive application that showcases both existing, as well as next generation/theoretical, breakthrough spacecraft propulsion in an engaging way.

SPIRIT (Space Propulsion Innovations and Realistic Interplanetary Travel)

Summary

Our project consists of an mobile application which showcases details of various spacecraft propulsion methods and puts them into the context of interplanetary travel using immersive technologies for the purpose of raising awareness about the importance of further advancements in the industry.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed an Android application which contains:


  • a short introduction showcasing achievements through propulsion innovations over time and the historical evolution.
  • details of different propulsion types, existing, conceptual and fictional, to educate and allow for an overview comparison between technologies.
  • interactive feature to journey to the closeest exoplanets to earth using various propulsion methods, to raise awareness of space travel timescales and exhibit possible destinations for interplanetary travel.
  • references to popular culture e.g. films, books and exciting news articles to engage younger audience and users outside the space industry to make a connection between exciting fiction/articles and current opportunities in the space industry.


The application starts with an introduction screen displaying a brief history of technological advancements in the field of propulsion. The introduction video can be skipped (and resumed at any time) at which point the home page displays an interactive grid of all included propulsion types. When clicked, each grid element triggers another screen containing the available features.


Upon clicking the 'Details' button, the user will see an image or representation of the selected propulsion technology along with some key information about it. This includes highlights, risks, a short description, the stage of development of the technology and estimated maximum travel and exhaust velocities.

Another feature the user can access launches when the "Journey" button is clicked. This leads the user to a feed of their own device's camera on top of which is rendered a set of exoplanets that the user can interact with. Clicking on one informs the user about several journey details and allows them to embark on the trip. This includes a representative space-time warp animation and a countdown timer to destination planet. The user can still use the device for other activities while waiting for a notification which gives exoplanet details upon arrival.

Clicking on the "Pop Culture" button will provide fun references to fiction or news articles covering spacecraft propulsion to engage all users.


As future developments we would like to add more features showcasing, for example, what discoveries have been made in the space exploration sector and how they have been enabled through propulsion technologies, as well as more ways to make use of embedded sensors and physical equipment in the user's device to provide an even more engaging and immersive experience. Finally, we could add functionality for customising spacecraft parameters for the journey feature.

How We Developed This Project

Space exploration is an extremely exciting field which inspires and unites people. Current exploration is restricted by journey speeds but advancements in space propulsion would open opportunities for new endeavours and result in further discoveries.


We considered what would be most engaging for various audiences and structured workload and resources into conceptual design, research, calculations and implementation.


The application was developed using Java programming language and the Android framework, and the code was written, built and run on a physical Android device with the help of Android Studio IDE.


One of the main challenges of the application was implementing the Augmented Reality scene and populating it with real exoplanet data fetched using NASA's exoplanet archive . This included transforming equatorial coordinates to cartesian coordinates for rendering the 3D models on the device's screen, and also keeping the planets' positions and dimensions accurate while trying to provide the best user interaction and to make the best use of device's resources.

Another problem that we have successfully overcome revolved around appropriate scaling of the realistic travelling times to the exoplanets to fit a much more restricted period of time available for travel on the app.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

NASA's exoplanet archive vas used to fetch information about discovered exoplanets around Earth and load it into our app for the journey feature.

Data & Resources

We used NASA's Exoplanet Archiva Application User Interface to access the details about exoplanets:

https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/program_interfaces.html

Tags
#breakthrough #propulsion #spacetravel #exoplanets #innovation #immersive #awareness #education #augmentedreality #hackathon
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.