Better Than Icarus

Naples | Unlocking the Secrets of the Sun

Icarus

High-Level Project Summary

We’ve designed an interactive website that collects all the important information about the reasons why the exploration of the Sun is important and the missions used for this purpose, moreover there is a timeline which links the spacecraft with each of the different missions.We also included a section where both adults and children are invited to send their ideas and drawings with ideas for future missions, in addition there are different social media accounts to encourage the engagement of people.t’s important because civilizations have always depended on the Sun for heat and light to live and new discoveries can be applied to enhance our daily lives.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/19G8fqnjV5jaAoamxknprgCEhUcsZ7-bV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=100347764867096091439&rtpof=true&sd=true

Link to Final Project

https://icarusspaceapps202.wixsite.com/icarus

Detailed Project Description

Introduction

We have decided to tackle the Unlocking the Secrets of the Sun challenge and have designed our own interactive website. The problem we are trying to solve is one of knowledge accessibility. We’ve designed an interactive website that collects all the important information about the reasons why the exploration of the Sun is important and the missions used for this purpose. What makes it different is the way it encapsulates all the information one might need to have a basic understanding of the past, present, and future of solar exploration.

Our Website

The Web-site is divided in four sections:

“Why does it matter?”: in this section we explain the importance of learning about the Sun, the effects of solar wind, the practical advantages of this research, like nuclear fusion and technological discoveries.
“Parker Solar Probe”: in this section we describe the journey of the Parker Solar Probe, from its first investigations to its latest discoveries although it hasn’t reached the closest orbit to the Sun yet (2024).
“Timeline”: in this section there are the dates of launch of each spacecraft from “The Orbiting Solar Observatory” to the most recent activity “Solar Orbiter”. Each S/C has its own card with a brief description of its exploration.
“Submit your ideas”: in this section it is possible for the users to submit their ideas, but also their creations, in order to help make the website better. It is also possible to take an interactive quiz to test your knowledge.

Our Links

Since one of the main goals of the challenge is to reach as many people as possible, we’ve opened different social media accounts to promote the website and encourage people to engage in learning about the Solar expeditions. As you can see, we’ve already set an Instagram account, a Telegram group and a Youtube channel.

Our Future

If we have to think about the future, the next step would be to create a “Young Minds'' page with a cartoonish character helping younger children to learn about the Sun with simplified explanations. We could also develop a small video game where people could create their own solar exploration mission and navigate around the Sun. Another idea would be to embed some quizzes at the end of each page.

Space Agency Data

For this project we used data from NASA and ESA websites that allow us to write every information about the exploration of the Sun and the involved spacecraft. Moreover, to describe the spacecraft’s features, we used the OSCAR website, especially regarding the orbit of each S/C. Every used images and videos come from NASA open sources.

Hackathon Journey

Our Space Apps experience was extraordinary. We learned so much not only about Solar expeditions but also about how to effectively communicate what we learned.

We can sum up the reasons why we chose this challenge in two points:

we didn’t know that much about solar expeditions, so there was a lot to learn;
we found that an interactive and easy to use method to teach about STEM subjects was very much needed.

Giving our engineering background, we approached the challenge with a “top-down” method. We identified the main issues to tackle and worked our way down until we had a list of small problems to solve.

We would like to thank the Space Apps’ team for their precious help and all of the sponsors for making this wonderful experience possible.