The Nostalgia| 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.

VLBI: A Monumental Triumph

Summary

Formed in the 60s to locate distant light specks; Quasars; VLBI, the technique of collecting radio waves on synchronized telescopes around the world to focus on one outer-space body worked as a giant virtual telescope helping us locate distant universe bodies with incredible precision like the imaging of black hole in 2019. When we reverse that process, we can measure how the Earth Orientation Parameters change in respect to these bodies. These significant irregularities in Earth's axis and velocity of rotation are caused by changes in mass or motion of Earth's surface due to earthquakes, large tides and ice melt. So, we have achieved greater milestones in intergalactic and Geodesy fields.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We have created a website that provides basic but crucial information about the lesser heard NASA mission, VLBI. This website will help students, educators and historians to find out more and be more curious about this technique as it helps us understand out home planet better.

How We Developed This Project

This past decade has seen tremendous progress in space exploration from sending robots to space and other planets to the first ever imaging of black hole, M87*. Being students of Computer Engineering by day and science nerds by night, there is nothing that fascinated our group members more than what's beyond the ground. So, it was a no-brainer that we chose VLBI which is one of the pioneer techniques in space exploration feats. Although, we had limited skills and experiences regarding hackathons and creating projects on virtual platforms, we wanted to give it shot. That's how the 6 of us came together to research on the VLBI technology and create an interactive and informative website on the formation, history and improvements made in the said NASA mission.

We used a few programming languages; HTML, CSS, JavaScript and SVG; necessary to create our website and build different elements in it. We hosted our website on GitHub and used various resources provided by NASA to include images and data on our project.

Besides having problems of distant collaboration due to COVID, we faced little to no other challenges as each of our members handled their part of the job with an excellent responsibility and care. We now have learned so much more than we would have otherwise. Each of us is more confident in his/her own researching, coding, storytelling and leading abilities.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Our work on the VLBI required scientifically correct and updated data about various findings of this technique. Through the provided resources, we have carefully chosen images and data to fit the needs of our project. We have studied open data on the web as well as NASA's history division to include numbers related to the Earth Oriented Parameters; Universal Time, Polar Motion and Celestial Motion and other fundamentals of VLBI. Similarly, through audio/videos of the partner agencies, our own understandings of these phenomena have eased which hopefully is reflected in our writings.

Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources
Tags
#VLBI #EHT #quasar #blackhole #blackholeimage #telescopes #radiowaves #digitalhistory #missionearth #inform #geodesy
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.