Off to Space| Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
Mission to Planet Earth: Satellites at a Glance
Summary
Through our project Off to Space chosen from the challenge Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History, we intend to educate ourselves and others about satellites send by NASA to monitor Earth. But as the topic is a bit scientific and out of reach for common people, we had made sure that the topics are shown in the simplest way possible into a website. Even though NASA has more than a dozen Earth science satellites in orbit, in this website we incorporate five main satellites which served as a part of Mission to Planet Earth namely TERRA, AQUA, SORCE,AURA and ICESat-2.Going back in history starting from TERRA we end up with ICESat-2. A quiz is also set for the user to check what he learned.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. To make everyone well informed about NASA’s earth observing satellites, we chose the challenge Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History. We have built an interactive and user-friendly website to provide basic info about NASA’s earth observing satellites and how it helped mankind. In this website we incorporate five main satellites which served as a part of Mission to Planet Earth namely TERRA, AQUA, SORCE, AURA and ICESat-2. Going back in history starting from TERRA we end up with ICESat-2.
Whenever people think of NASA, we probably think of astronauts, moon, stars, spacecrafts and telescopes that study distant planets and far off galaxies. Little did we know that Earth is the planet that NASA has explored the most, the only planet in the entire solar system where we can live. Earth orbiting satellites acted as significant contributors to NASA’s Earth science mission allowing us to observe the period changes in human and natural environment. So, in order to make people realize how much NASA has explored our planet and how it helped us in coping with the changes that are occurring we developed this project.
In our website, as an introduction we provide basics of earth science mission and some of the satellites that are part of the mission thus the user gets familiarized with these. Moving to the subpages the user gets a detailed information about the provided satellites. The Quiz provided in the website serves as a medium to make the user understand how much they have learned. Our website also gives a clear-cut idea how satellites made lives of fishermen, farmers and other common people easier and better.
With the help of this website we are sure that all our users including kids and people from non- science background can get a clear picture about satellites that are observing earth in various aspects like sudden climate changes, solar UV radiations, measure the elevation of Earth's surface, evaporation, and cycling of water, pollution around the globe, change in ocean level etc.
How We Developed This Project
Exploring earth from space sounded really fascinating. Then we realized that satellites played a vital role in NASA's Earth Science Mission. So, we decided to give information about various earth observing satellites. Gathering information was not an easy task for us as the information were scattered across different websites. Then we thought, why not club all these details into a single website? That inspired us to create this website. Currently the website provides description about five satellites. We are planning to update our website periodically with more and more satellites.
We used Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Java Script to develop our website. Also, text editors such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Atom, Sublime Text were also used. We collaborated our contributions through GitHub. This project helped us to understand more about web development. The main problem we faced were technological limitations like face to face communication, internet accessibility etc.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
In this website we did try to add all available valuable information from various resources of NASA such as the details provided by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center , NASA’S Earth Science Mission Fleet and LASP regarding satellites and their functioning. In addition, the data about Mission to Planet Earth where also collected from Satellite Mission from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Earth observation proposal system (EOPRO) by European Space Agency (ESA).
We got the blueprint of all these missions which are either managed by Goddard or it acted as a significant contributor from Goddard Missions - Present. The visualization provided by NASA’S Earth Science Mission Fleet showed us the orbits of NASA’S Earth Science Mission including both NASA-run missions as well as missions run by organizations that NASA has partnered with, that are considered operational as of March 2017. We got access to global climate data produced by EOPRO’S Climate Change Initiative which was an initiative of ESA. JAXA for Earth which is the Earth Data Collection by JAXA Satellites enabled us to watch over the global environment and human society from space.
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1b9BHH-V6FGeULowhR7_1o9YCOX-RC8rO/view?usp=sharing
Project Code
Data & Resources
In this website we did try to add all available valuable information from various resources of NASA such as the details provided by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center , NASA’S Earth Science Mission Fleet and LASP regarding satellites and their functioning. In addition, the data about Mission to Planet Earth where also collected from Satellite Mission from Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Earth observation proposal system (EOPRO) by European Space Agency (ESA) andwikipedia.