FMWill - Space Apps Challenge

FMWill| Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

NASA’s activities in space have brought new knowledge of the Earth, inspiring new ways of thinking about humanity and the planet. However, many people aren’t aware that NASA studies the Earth in addition to other planets. Your challenge is to tell stories of NASA’s Earth science enterprise using interactive digital tools. This will test your technical skills and your ability to think like a historian or educator.

Brief History of Apollo 13

Summary

In this project, We’ve aimed to describe the famous event "Apollo 13" which is commonly referred to as a "successful failure".We had two main reasons for choosing this project, one: clarifying the misunderstanding about the means of failure. And two: examining a significant approach in the very moment of crisis. But to tell the famous story, we’ve chosen an uncommon, artistic way.first, We decided how do we want to inform people, and creating a web page seemed like an ideal way because of its accessibility. but to support the ambiance and give the vibe, we’ve focused on the design of the web page.in addition to this, we created a song made of voice recordings.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our main purpose is to avoid misinformation about Apollo 13 and how to learn in moments of crisis.

We have started to make research about Apollo 13 and decided that it was the great example of “successful failure”. This case taught us to manage a crisis moment, different approaches to the problem and don’t give up any time. And it was an unusual experience of humanity. Then, we planned the process of Apollo 13 project: what we are going to do, how we share these informations and which one is the most effective one.

We established a website to share information and create Instagram, Facebook accounts.

After opening the website you can see the timeline of Apollo 13’s beginning to landing. Also you can see photos, audios and videos. All what we did about the Apollo 13 is give information by embracing the MAYA method, “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable” in order to deliver our message and information to masses.

How We Developed This Project

Our main purpose in choosing this project comes from our passion for the universe.

Our passion for the sky and beyond has always been our inspiration to explore more and to push our limits in unprecedented situations.

In 11.04.1970 a rescue mission after a malfunction in Apollo 13 mission showed us that collaboration, crisis management, creativity and most importantly, hope were enough to deal with unexpected challenges. We chose that topic since it’s a great real-life example of “Where there's a will there's a way.”

We wanted to embrace a holistic approach to the Apollo 13 topic by covering the mission from its liftoff moment to splashdown moment. Additionally, the mission alone differs from many lunar missions and it's inadequate to just teach the rescue part of it without the rest of the mission. In our opinion, Apollo 13 is the second most important lunar mission after Apollo 11 because Apollo 13 dramatically changed the future of space exploration.

We used "Wix" to build our website and received our free domain from the offers tab of our dashboard. Besides Wix, we used Photoshop to create some icons that we couldn't find on the Wix website builder.

For the music part of the website, we used Studio One to compose new music by taking the audio recordings as input from NASA's audio archive.

We expected the biggest difficulty of our Space Apps experience would be working from home. But it turned out our will to work together knows no distances. We collaborated 24/7 on Zoom while turning our ideas into a reality. Nevertheless, our main challenge was building the website since Wix wasn't intuitive as it seems. However, we dealt with the set of problems about the website by trying new methods and innovative ways of thinking.

After completing our projects, we learned a lot about NASA's vision and mission for space exploration. Besides that, we acquired one of the most important leadership traits, crisis management. But most importantly, we understood that saying “Where there's a will there's a way.” is actually real.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We generally used the resources provided by NASA and other open-sourced data for 2 parts of our Apollo 13 website, which are Music and Content.

For the music part of the project, we used the data from NASA’s audio archive which includes liftoff sounds, astronauts’ radio messages and many more. Then, we combined our audio data with some creativity to produce a new kind of music. When people listen to it, they will match the sounds with the essay they read. So it makes them feel like they are actually in Apollo-13.

For the content part, we used some of the essays which NASA established on their website. First, we read all the essays about Apollo-13. After that, we combined and mixed some of them and we wrote a new essay about Apollo-13. We tried to make it more like a story so when people read that they learn about Apollo-13 while they enjoy it. We want to teach the readers why everyone called it "a successful failure".

The data we found on apolloinrealtime.org tremendously contributed to our project since it provided us a simplified version of the whole mission. A eureka moment happened when we first saw the data on that website. Then, we reshaped our website like a milestone.