1) What inspired our team to choose this challenge?

Asteroids are hidden figures lurking in near earth’s orbit, which can be creators of new life, or weapons of Destruction. They are nearly not discussed enough, the reason could be, as they are events which are not seen at the time of happening, people get the news of an asteroid impact after it has occurred. This really inspired our team to create something that visually captured everyone’s attention and was easily accessible for everyone.

2) What was our approach to developing this project?

Our team followed a design process. We first researched about various asteroids- previous happenings, future mission, technology used, their timeline, properties, physical attributes, differences between asteroids and meteors etc. Further we brainstormed possible ways in which we could interactively portray our objective, keeping in mind that the solution should be digital and easily accessible and understand for people of all age groups.

Following which we made a mood board and logo:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Uz_bL9YmT5Rf_3RsB3QGQfp-VxD9KJLt/view?usp=sharing. Once the look and feel of our solution was decided we moved on to the information architecture (view here) https://drive.google.com/file/d/109hGGqYgVW5VMVpz3x4X8Tqp45EOdNJZ/view?usp=sharing

This gave us a clear direction to move ahead in, after that we designed an interactive solution following our goal.

3) What tools did we use?

The tools we used to develop the project were Miro/Mural for research and brainstorming, Figma for prototyping, video editor for creating videos.

4) Problems and achievements.

The problems we faced while developing were during collaborating as some of us had connectivity issues due to which our work used to get lagged a lot, it was also difficult to show all types of asteroids in one medium as information about most types was not present. It was also a challenge to collect visual representation of how the past asteroids looked.

The achievements we did were that we used a very accessible medium to display all important information in an interactive way, we made the whole experience of asteroids digital so that instead of going to museum people can access the information easily on the website and the application.

NASA’s website was of great help when we started collecting history of asteroids. They not only mentioned the name and physical attributes but also show cased their images, orders of magnitude in the brightness of the dust jets and coma and also showed the position of asteroids in space. They also gave access to press releases that talked about mission development like the 16 May 2013 and the 25 May 2011 NASA Press Releases.

NASA/JPL’s website was really informative when it came to explain each and every detail about the asteroids and their impacts. The JPL’s NEO Deflection app gave a simulation of an asteroid impact which was very interactive and informative as it gave us an understanding of what the technical terms used were and what kind of factors were important to consider the possibility of an asteroid impact.

NASA’s solar system exploration helped in giving us a clearer timeline and in depth information like the composition, classification data and lead us to resources like The International Astronomical Union which further gave us the names of all asteroids.

NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory and ASTEROID RADAR RESEARCH introduced us to Asteroid Radars and provides with the Arecibo radar images of asteroids.

Please click the link below to see how we demonstrate our solution:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rXWSQlCUxQlb2rq7h7t-8E-M1FTP2gfD/view?usp=sharing

Also check out our video that gives a brief explanation of our solution:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m0Ri7wWxKM6qlqmeAQIhpQTSfazWSB4q/view?usp=sharing

To check the prototype of our solution:

https://www.figma.com/file/2GGJdEoIHsynI8fIGTeobY/NASA-DIGITAL-PROBE-Asteroid?node-id=0%3A1

Asteroids. (n.d.). NASA Solar System Exploration. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/asteroids/overview/?page=0&per_page=40&order=name+asc&search=&condition_1=101%3Aparent_id&condition_2=asteroid%3Abody_type%3Ailike

In depth | Asteroids, comets & meteors – NASA solar system exploration. (n.d.). NASA Solar System Exploration. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/in-depth/

JPL small-body database browser. (2003, August 29). JPL Solar System Dynamics. https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?orb=1;sstr=1862

(n.d.). Asteroid Radar Research. https://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/

Talbert, T. (2019, February 12). Near-Earth Object Observations Program. Retrieved September 28, 2020, from https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/neoo

Asteroid impacts: 10 biggest known hits. (2013, February 15). National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/2/130214-biggest-asteroid-impacts-meteorites-space-2012da14/

Asteroid and comet watch. (2015, January 21). NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/asteroid-and-comet-watch

Asteroids. (2020, August 25). Welcome to the NSSDCA. https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/planets/asteroidpage.html

Sentry: Earth impact monitoring. (n.d.). Center for NEO Studies. https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/