VOYAGER TROOPERS - Space Apps Challenge

VOYAGER TROOPERS| 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.

Explorers For Protection

Summary

People always want to learn, curiosity is one of the many evolutionary traits that got us here. To help them acquire this knowledge, we have developed a website and an application that will provide the audience with the aforementioned information. We have incorporated immersive videos and even well-written articles based on the data we’ve collected and compiled to give the viewers and readers, a captivating experience.

How We Addressed This Challenge

People want to learn but don't always have the time to flip through hundreds of pages of data:

We seek to provide people with information through well-compiled and immersive means which in spite of their busy lives they can enjoy. The Voyager Troopers have made it possible for people who don't necessarily have time nor the attention span to flip through the databases to enjoy new discoveries and strides made by space agencies. We've solved this by compiling the data ourselves writing scripts based on those data and providing the audience with Videos that are neither too long nor too repetitive.

People don't know where to get the information they didn't know they wanted:

We thought about this for a while and came up with an idea to create an hub of information, so we created an website and an android application that would not only provide the audience with entertaining form of knowledge the way the want it but also a discussion platform for them to talk about it and share some information among them selves.(Coming soon.)

The aforementioned points couldn't be more true especially for the history of science that helped the Earth:

Most of the population knows about space exploration and some of them are updated on leaps space agencies are making, however, the impact this exploration has brought on our home planet is ironically unexplored. Which is why our topic for this project is "Explorers for Protection". We have incorporated multiple forms of media that explain in a simple yet informative way, the steps Earth's explorations program is taking to protect the Earth. Some of these may include Ozone protection, Asteroid Defense programs and Measuring our Carbon footprint.

Something for the readers:

We considered the possibility that our Videos might not be liked by everyone, some people just like to read, we get it, so we've also added articles that paint a clear picture on the same things we explained in the Videos.

While we are certainly satisfied with our efforts, we are nowhere near achieving what we intended, with time the tools we've developed will evolve and will help us pave the future that will bridge the gap between researchers and the common folk.

The links if you want to check them out,

App APK: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ud1mGIxqj4xrO2w_oNy4c4byX-nIQYn0/view?usp=sharing

Website: https://explorersforprotection.co/index.html

How We Developed This Project

The members in our team were highly concerned about the ignorance and misinformation prevalent among the common mass about the impact space exploration has on our planet. We want to tell the global audience, how much the exploration programs help our planet not only by protecting it, supplying us with information about the early universe and ourselves but also the help it yields in supporting the future of technology.

For the data:

We used various resources provided by this website to find , extract and compile the data we required.

For the App:

We used Unity App Developer to help us with our front-end app development and we used Visual Basic and C# to code the back-end for our app. This would come as a challenge on its own because Unity is usually used as an game developer tools and getting files like a pdf to work with it would be a world of annoyance on it's own, we managed to work around this problem by adding openURL scripts.

We used different Adobe products to create the UI textures we required.

For the media:

Adobe premiere helped us create the videos and the audios used in them were recorded, edited, improved and exported using Audacity. We used various google services to write and publish the articles.

For the website:

Finally, we used the Porkbun offer in this website to purchase a domain and used Weebly to help us with the front-end portion for the website,

After fixing the bugs we found, our mobile application and website started coming together, due to the limitation of the softwares we were using and the COVID-19 lockdown most of the things didn't turn out the way we wanted them to but we found ways to work around those problems and make things work.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used the data we found in NASA, JAXA and CSA's journals, articles and research papers as the sources of facts and figures for our Videos and Articles.

For Example:

The data we found on Ozone layer depletion helped us create a narrative of how human activities among others were causing our planets protective coating to wither off.

Furthermore, the data we got from EOSPSO and NOAA carve a picture into the mind of our viewers about the efforts space agencies are putting into looking for problems and determining potential threats to our ecosystem and our planet.

In addition, we looked for information on various Earth monitoring satellites, the tech they use to detect and identify problems with our Ozone. We found most of these on Journals published by NASA, the NOAA and ESA.

We looked for solutions, currently be deployed, the ones that are in development and further expanded on the idea of possible solutions. We found data on satellites like the Aura or the weather balloons being deployed on the south pole by the NOAA. to stretch and further prove our point. "Space exploration helps us protect the Earth"

We also discovered and explained how challenges may arise while working on massive projects like the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership Satellite and the Joint Polar Satellite System NOAA-20 satellite and how they may be combatted.

Finally, we explained how the TOMS and the EOS are monitoring our ozone, the strides we're taking when developing new technology, the things we want to consider when tackling the problem and the objective of the mission.

All of this was possible for us to explain because we had access to NASA, JAXA, CSA and the NOAA's data.