Awards & Nominations
X-TRATOCONDOR has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
XTRATOCONDOR
High-Level Project Summary
Our solution is an interactive platform that will provide the basic information on how to build stratospheric balloons to different types of users with an entertaining and simple tone. This information will be shown as a game/story telling for children, with important details, manuals and syllabus for teachers and structured diagrams for university students. Our platform will help you in every step of this wonderful process of getting to Near Space and will allow you to go deeper in each step, supporting you with materials such as tutorials, manuals, calculators and tips. Our team has put together all the experience in balloon launches to make space accessible to everyone!
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Summary
The launch of stratospheric balloons due to its low cost is used to send satellite instrumentation or study the atmosphere, but it is also used as a training method for school and university studentsHowever, although there is information on the internet to build one, this information is often scattered and in many occasions is too technical. For this reason it could be difficult to organize and interpret the information, and therefore to build a HAB (High Altitude Balloon) for people without university training such as elementary or high school students. Our solution is to present an interactive platform that depending on the age of the user could be presented as a game (for the younger ones) or as a tutorial (for the older ones) as a story telling. Where people will have all the necessary information to build and launch a stratospheric balloon, in addition we will attach resources where they can investigate more in depth about each step. Some of the resources that can be accessed are lists of materials, integration tutorials, flight planning tools among other resources that can be accessed from the platform. Finally we will add all the international experience of our team in balloon launch missions highlighting the common mistakes that are often made in these projects while maintaining an entertaining and fresh tone. Our solution is focused on generating a more accessible space for everyone.
Detail
We are ILLARI a multidisciplinary team of mechatronics engineers, aerospace engineers, physicists, graphic designers and UX designers who have put our experience to generate our solution called "XTRATOCONDOR".
The name comes from the combination of the words Stratosphere (XTRATO) and condor (A Peruvian giant bird), since most of the group was Peruvian. The name of our team also has a meaning in Quechua, an ancient Peruvian language spoken today in remote villages and to which we wanted to pay homage by giving a message that space is accessible to anyone. ILLARI means "clear sky" and that is what our team wants to do for the people who will use our solution, clear their doubts so they can reach the space!
Our solution is an interactive platform, which has basic information for the construction and launch of a HAB, however the platform also provides resources from which you can deepen each stage of the process. In addition, the platform adjusts to different types of users:
- Elementary school
- High school
- Junior undergrade
Given the different needs that each type of user has, our solution adapts to each one. For this hackathon we have decided to focus on the "Elementary school" profile, however we have mapped how we could propose a more general solution and a first draft is shown in a flowchart.
- Elementary school
For this level we have two types of users, in this case we consider that students need information as much as their teachers do. However, teachers and students have different tasks, which are shown for each user:
Elementary school student: At this age children have an amazing imagination, it is impressive the capacity they have to ask questions and look for answers. (Inspiring!). That is why we consider that it is necessary to keep their attention and give them all the facilities so that they can build the experiment. If they want more information they will also have access to the resources but it is not mandatory for them.
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Eementary school teacher: For this user we have tried to give them specific advice on some logistical details that they should take into consideration. Their main function should be to keep the children's attention and guide them in this process. However, if the teacher wants more detailed information we have prepared for them a syllabus in which they can refer to.
High School: We gave this user two projects, which require the use of telemetry system and also a camera to record a video of the launch of the payload.
University: We gave these users two interesting projects, one of them is the development of a live supporting system for byological tests and a missions that consists in the measurement of stratospheric aerosols.
In order to realize this platform we have used figma with the plugin storyset for the illustrations. The flowchart was also developed in figma. Additionally we have attached some documents from google and colab notebboks. Although for now we have placed a prototype, our idea of placing the codes is that in the future we can implement a website that has all the possible tools.
As if that were not enough, our platform will have its own calculator and will be full of resources and quizzes
from which the student will be able to deepen much more each stage, for example in the part of materials they will have at their disposal link where to buy the components.
In recent years space has become more accessible to everyone, this phenomenon is called "new space" and this is thanks to the popularization of cheaper technologies such as "cubesats". However, these technologies are usually worked on in universities, mostly at the senior level.
So we wondered how we can keep the motivation towards STEM fields in children and young people using a factor they love: SPACE and make this "new space" a reality for all ages.
With XTRATOCONDOR we hope that stratospheric balloon launches will become popular and that people all over the world can get closer to their dreams of discovering space and also get interested in STEM fields.
Because ANYONE CAN REACH THE SPACE!
Deliverables for review:
- Draft mission flowchart for all users
- Syllabus sugested that we developed for teachers of elementary and high school.
- Calculator of Hellum volume, Estimated Burst Altitude, Average Ascent Rate and Ascent Timer in an excel sheet.
- Colab calculator of Helium notebook.
Note that the demo is in desktop size, if you can't see it correctly you can adjust it to your screen:
Space Agency Data
https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/sciences/balloons/about-stratospheric-balloons.asp
http://rexusbexus.net/
https://www.nasa.gov/content/high-altitude-student-platform-hasp
Hackathon Journey
It was an amazing experience. We learned different facts about High Altitude Balloons and how to launch them, but also we learned to work in team with people from different countries, sharing our knowledge and some interesting experiences. We decided to do it because it is hard to find especific information about how to launch a High Altitude Balloon, and many of the available sources are very technical, which makes it harder to understand for kids or people who is not used to work in engineering projects. Our approach was making one platform was to use for people who aims to do HAB projects on different levels. The challenges and setbacks were solved working together, as each member has different knowledge and experiences. We would like to thank to the NASA Space Apps Challenge organizer committee for giving us this opportunity and to all the people who helped us during the development of this project.
References
https://www.stratoflights.com/en/
https://stratostar.com/
Tags
#STEM #HAB #Stratosphere
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.