T.A.R.S.| 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.

T.A.R.S. Project - Understanding the Pale Blue Dot: Climate Variability and the Arctic

Summary

Our team established a website to highlight three main issues and to create public awareness:1- Global warming and climate change2-Changes in the Arctic environment and biodiversity3- Unnoticed research of NASA on the Arctic regionWe believe that a website which was created by using specific data, images and videos is able to highlight the fact that NASA is an institution working not only in space exploration but also conducting scientific research about our home planet, the Earth.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed a website by using scientific data, images and videos to create a public awareness particularly about the problems related with the climate change and global warming in the Arctic region.


The link of our website:

https://tarsproject.co


We believe that the public might not show interest in the research of NASA regarding the Earth science missions because of the fact that numerous websites of NASA laying down the data to the users on the internet mainly consist of large paragraphs of text. In the conremporary era, because of the popularization of social media, the time span of attention of the public, unfortunately, has decreased significantly. Instead of reading large paragraphs, people tend to look at an image for a couple of seconds and move on. Since this is the case, we aimed to create a website with numerous visuals, and at the same time, we tried to limit the amount of plain texts. The purpose of us was to create a website in which people can easily navigate. Our main expectation is to create public awareness in a short amounf of time which will be spent on the website. Even if we reach a few people, we believe that it will count as a small step, and we know what small steps are able to do if they come together for the sake of humanity.

How We Developed This Project

We have always been particularly interested in space exploration and scientific research about our home planet. After we realized that we can create a website with basic tools in just 2 days to create public awareness, we started our project. We have benefited from the partnership between Porkbun and Weebly to build our website. To communicate efficiently, we used Discord. We had an issue since we were not able to work on the same page of the website effectively while we were in the building process. We solved this issue by working on different pages at the same time while communicating through Discord.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used some visuals from the Image Gallery of NASA. We also benefited from the Youtube channels of NASA while we are trying to embed videos about climate change, global warming and the latest environmental situation in the Arctic region. We also collected data from various websites of NASA and from some documents of the agency that we found in the open archive. We firmly believe that using those visuals and data was fundamentally beneficial and influential for our project.

Project Demo
Data & Resources
Tags
#climate change, #global warming, #arctic, #biodiversity, #climate variability, #weather, #environment
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.