The Messengers| Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
Project Hermes
Summary
Our group developed an interactive app that contains data, curiosities and facts about remarkable and inspiring stories from NASA's trajectory. In this app, based on an interface developed by the team, we can select which subject we would like to know, such as space programs, geological surveys on earth, among other studies done by the American agency. When accessing a certain category, images, texts, videos and GIFs related to the theme will be presented. In addition, in upcoming updates, users will be able to interact with other science enthusiasts.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Nowadays, many subjects that were previously treated only as science fiction are becoming a reality for humanity, such as space exploration. However, even knowing that the technology is constantly evolving, the knowledge about these projects is not always presented to the community in an accessible way, which generates the disinterest of people who do not have technical knowledge to understand academic articles.
Based on this, our team developed “Hermes”, an interactive app that contains data, curiosities and facts about remarkable and inspiring stories of NASA's trajectory. In our app, with a few clicks, the user has contact with the most diverse historical events in a simplified interface, in addition to the possibility of obtaining NASA data in real time.
We hope that, with this tool that we developed, the knowledge about the spacial area will be widely disseminated and easily accessible to all audiences, since such information is not of the general public. We hope that, through Hermes, people feel more integrated with this community, regardless of whether they have a degree or not.
How We Developed This Project
Since earlier times, NASA has been making a presence in the history of mankind, since the space race the agency has been winning the heart and inspiring several generations, however, with so much technical information, it’s necessary to create tools to share this knowledge with the community. In order of that, we, members of The Messengers team, enthusiasts of science and space exploration, decided to accept the challenge “mission for planet earth: a digital history”.
The main objective of our app is the scientific dissemination, which will be done through an integration of research and studies done by NASA and presented to the reader in an interactive and didactic way. It’s importance is directly related to the situation that the planet is going through, since that in the present time it is very easy to find fake information from unreliable sources, which end up propagating disinformation and disinterest in scientific matters.
Therefore, the project was developed based on this need to combat information from questionable sources and also to motivate people who are interested in Science, but are outdated on top issues, such as space exploration. In this way, we apply strategies to include the maximum number of people in our community, using an attractive interface for all ages, with larger icons, photo galleries, dark mode so as not to tire the eyes while reading, among other techniques to improve the experience of our project and didactics of our content.
Our team has a developer specialized in the area of app creation, and due to his prior knowledge in this field, he chose to code the project using the Dart programming language by Flutter. This Framework was chosen due to the practicality of its interface, in addition to the possibility of developing the app with the same code language for Android and IOS.
Subsequently, the goal is to make new updates to add a tool that accesses real-time data from NASA and other space agencies, such as, for example, a daily image of an image captured on the reference day. In addition, as previously stated, we intend to expand the application to a scientific social network, where users will be able to interact with other readers from different regions around the world. Within the community, a ranking system will be developed, which, depending on the person's engagement, will present the most active users and upon reaching a certain score the person will receive the role of ambassador, giving options to edit and share content within the app.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
First of all, we used NASA's historical data on the Apollo and Artemis programs to develop the project's initial idea. In other words, we selected the most important sections about each mission separately, and after that, we rewrote it in a way that made it more attractive to the community in general. Later, we used images from the NASA gallery to cleanly design the icons for each mission and program separately, so that we could create an interface that mixes didactic written content and safe visual content.
In the future, we will also use data from NASA, JAXA and others, on climate, environmental and related controls to create an interface that updates the user in real time on information related to this subject. In addition, we intend to use the image gallery to create an interactive social network between users, in which it will be possible to share images, such as NASA's image of the day.
Project Demo
- https://youtu.be/yHyEPWizy_0
Data & Resources
- https://history.nasa.gov/
- https://history.nasa.gov/frequent_research_topics.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/content/nasa-history/videos
- https://catalog.archives.gov/search?q=Earth%20Science&f.oldScope=(descriptions%20or%20online)&f.recordGroupNoCollectionId=255&SearchType=advanced&tabType=online&rows=100#.X2olV92E3rk.link
- https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/APSR-JSC-09423.pdf
- http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo%207_10%20Finding%20Aid.pdf
- https://history.nasa.gov/monograph3.pdf