Planetary Professors - Space Apps Challenge

Planetary Professors | 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.

Planetary Professor Teaching Timeline

Summary

Although NASA is well-known for its research in the realm of space exploration, a lesser-known fact is that NASA also studies our home: Earth. NASA's Earth science initiative is extremely vital in understanding the environment in which we live in for not only the health of our planet but the health of the human race. Yet, the acknowledgment is still lacking. For our project, we created an interactive website that allows users to explore some of NASA's various Earth science missions in the form of a star constellation timeline. As the Planetary Professors, we seek to display to younger audiences this essential information to inspire future generations.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a website that featured a timeline of Earth science missions from NASA. Our URL is https://madysonbrown7.wixsite.com/spaceapps . It is catered toward younger audiences to inform them about the lesser-known missions NASA uses to study the Earth. Since most people recognize NASA as only researching space, our team wanted to engage the viewers and educate them on the multitude of ways NASA researches our home planet. The timeline is interactive and decorated as a constellation because we wanted to gear it towards younger students. Our constellation is made of 16 stars and once the viewer clicks on a star it takes them to another page which will educate them on a specific mission. They will then be directed through a series of pages where they will learn about the launch date, the launch site, the data, how the data is applied to our planet, and what the status of the mission currently is. Our ambitions are to teach the general public and aspiring future STEM students, in order for viewers to gain a better understanding of the importance of observing the vital features of our home.

How We Developed This Project

Our team desired to both teach the public and inspire the next generation of future scientist to take interest in STEM-related topics. The Mission to Planet Earth challenge was the perfect project for our goals. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a website with an interactive timeline that was visually appealing with a space-oriented theme since, of course, these mission are conducted from the cosmos. However, through technical issues, it took us a long time to open the original website builder we were going to use that eventually ended up failing to operate on our computers. We, instead, used a website builder called Wix in order to craft our site and utilized its features to create vector art to make out constellation. Through these tools, we were able to add our creativity into the format of the website through inserting images, sounds, and videos. We unfortunately faced more problems with Wix, however, in that we could not edit the website all together. Only one person at a time, which is the creator of the website (Madyson Brown) so we each had to take turns adding things in or it would not save everything. Also, we faced the issue of not being able to add our own website domain since Wix requires users to purchase their premium features to add it in. With our time constraints, we made the best use of the pros of the Wix tools as we could.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used NASA's website to select which missions we were going to research and teach about in our timeline. We also used other resources, such as the eoPortal, a directory of Earth observation missions, the Colorado State University Atmospheric Science Department website, the Ball Aerospace and Technologies website, which built the TEMPO instrument, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from the U.S. Department of Commerce. These sites proved helpful in our research of each mission and allowed us to create the comprehensive model we have now. Because we discovered the various missions sent by NASA, it influenced us to set these stories in a chronological order to create a timeline of the progress made by these missions.