Team Baymax

Universal Event | Artfully Illuminated Asteroids

Lucy's Perspective

High-Level Project Summary

Lucy, named after our prehistoric ancestor's fossil, will soon be hurling through space to find out the secrets of our universe. She might just find out how Earth and other planets in our solar system got to where they are right now through a thorough inspection of the asteroid belts she’ll pass through. Though, here’s our problem: the public isn’t given the opportunity to appreciate Lucy’s mission enough. Given this, we’ve built a 3D Model of what Lucy might just see if her mission is successful, attempting to target children already curious about space and older visual learners. As we look to space for our future and past, it becomes increasingly crucial to develop public awareness.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10dzCAyTYC-9oObkCZdH_EsygxPoeI3fu5uovn5mfxzM/edit?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://home.teambaymax.co/

Detailed Project Description

Our website showcases the main aspects of our work; through the specific building of each asteroid, mimicking rough sights captured from the Hubble telescope and former artist renderings to the chatbot and image slideshow of Lucy's mission. The end-product is meant to add to the disappointingly small list of Lucy' renders and build up anticipation for Lucy’s launch. The benefits of creating this anticipation through 3D models and various HTML elements increases the public’s understanding of not only the formation of planets but space in general. Students other than those going into astronomy can then look at the idea of space for hope considering various, abstract missions NASA is currently undergoing (attempting to find out if life is within other planets, trying to find present water on Exoplanets, looking at whether other planets are habitable, etc) hopefully accumulating more future scholars in the field (included those currently underrepresented).

We used HTML, CSS and JavaScript to code our website, Youtube to upload our renders, Google Drive to collate our renders for private use and Blender to create our 3D Models. We also used Appypie to create our Chatbot Lucy and GoDaddy to get a domain.

Space Agency Data

Complete Websites:

These complete websites inspired us to continue Lucy's mission through learning more about the team behind the spacecraft.

http://lucy.swri.edu/

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/lucy/main/index

Videos:

These videos helped us grasp the tougher, more elaborate parts of the mission

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAY-SMFNfynqz1bdoaV8BeQ

https://youtu.be/NlHJV2OyxII

https://youtu.be/57aLfX3ZX2I

Blog posts:

We received a variety of images and information from these blog posts.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2020/lucy-spacecraft

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/nasa-s-lucy-in-the-cleanroom

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2021/07/lucy-update-july-2021/

Jupiter Model:

We used this model to keep as a constant in our 3D model to make the placement of other elements clearer.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/2375/jupiter-3d-model/

Hackathon Journey

How would you describe your Space Apps experience?

Our Hackathon Journey has been an increasingly interesting mixture of fascination and concern. Eyes stuck on 3D Models of Asteroids and files of HTML code, we’ve been trying to compute a variety of sources to develop an interesting end-product for the public.

What did you learn?

We’ve learned along the way how to make image carousels and debug in HTML, CSS and JS, how to add textures, animate models and angle cameras in Blender as well as how to effectively research through specific (NASA) databases.

What inspired your team to choose this challenge?

We were especially inspired by the abstract and ambitious goals of Lucy and her developing team, the thought of their hard work and anxiousness throughout this process made us realise it would only take a couple of nights to ensure their research is well-appreciated.

What was your approach to developing this project?

Our larger approach was to ensure that the content we were creating was accurate and had the capacity to inspire a larger network of people, as art does. To do this, we aspired to ensure that the reference images we used were from NASA or other space agencies and that our Blender models had some aspect of movement, thus we created animations of each asteroid.

How did your team resolve setbacks and challenges?

Our biggest challenge was retaining the dignity of the project while completing it within the time limit. We resolved this issue through division of labour; Saloni worked on creating prototypes of our asteroids and Lucy’s parts, Kaylee and Nethmini tweaked these prototypes and Manahil developed and maintained our website. We also struggled with having an interactivity feature, thus we created a chatbot to easily disperse information on Lucy.

Is there anyone you'd like to thank and why?

We would like to thank the team behind Lucy for not being scared to develop a dream and legacy larger than themselves, Blender Guru (YouTuber) alongside tutorial websites for helping us with what we didn’t even know beforehand and our parents!