Cosmic Pals

Chennai, Tamilnadu | Unlocking the Secrets of the Sun

Secrets Sundone

High-Level Project Summary

We developed an explanatory video covering the science and technology related to the Parker Solar Probe and what it explores and an interactive tool that helps the user reconstruct the Parker Solar Probe. Since the key to the challenge was increasing awareness and understanding of these spacecrafts and the data they provide, by presenting our project in multimedia format with an interactive component would help do so by engaging the audience.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VQIWEJ-ScJlysRFcgPv2geH1xaTLhrck/view

Link to Final Project

https://mega.nz/folder/aXBmzJJQ#rh5ZcA8pMmB6ap6zTVRkCg

Detailed Project Description

1)About the Video

The video focuses on the Parker Solar Probe, by first covering the helio-physics it aims to explore, what is known to us about the sun and what is not and how it affects us on Earth.

furthermore, the data collected by the probe and the deductions researchers have made from it so far has been discussed. The technology behind the development of the probe has also been explored, with a focus on how engineers building the probe tackled unique technological challenged. By focusing on a single mission from different perspectives, the video aims to show the collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of scientific research.

2) About The Interactive Tool/Game

The interactive tool is a fun way for users to construct the probe virtually and learn about the different parts by dragging and dropping the parts of the probe using mouse and further launching it into space. All the artwork present in the game was made by us including the components of the probe.

For video-editing we used the software DaVinci Resolve 17 and For the interactive tool we used Unity Engine 2020.19f1 . Also for the digital art we used the Autodesk Sketchbook. The hardware for the art used was XP Pen Artist 15.6 Pro and for the video editing a.Dell Inspiron 14 7000 was used. The programming language used to make the interactive tool was C#.

Space Agency Data

For the content part of the video we used articles about the Parker Solar Probe on the NASA website—the articles about Iowa physicists using probe data to better describe the sun’s electric field and about the probe data revealing more about the behavior of inner solar system dust. We also sourced information about the solar wind from NASA’s Space Technology 5 website.

We referred to the following sites --

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe

For the video clips and images, we used:

(Image Credits)

https://pixabay.com/

https://www.pexels.com/

Shutterstock

(Video Credit)

http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/Multimedia/Videos.php#Integration-and-Test

https://www.videvo.net/

https://www.videezy.com/

Hackathon Journey

The space apps experience was all in all, a pretty thrilling journey. Our main takeaway from this challenge was that single missions often have a lot of research from many different areas that make them possible and working on them may give some insight into previous technical challenges as well. We chose this challenge because we thought it would be a fun challenge to try and communicate what we learnt about the sun and technical research through learning about the Parker Solar Probe in a way that caught the imagination of the general public. As a team, we split our work into research, scriptwriting, narration, video-making and editing and game-development. Each person worked within their specific sphere of work as most of us were comfortable working independently, but we were careful to ensure that at every stage our individual work gelled well with the others--for instance, the script and the video-graphics, while both developed independently, needed to go together well to make sense. Of course, there were Challenges about the scale of the project and how much depth there should be to the explanation provided in the video, but we managed to find suitable compromises on both fronts.

We’d like to thank NASA for making their database publicly accessible and all the scientists who’ve made available the tremendous pile of information we were able to use via the holy grail of information that is the internet. We’re also thankful to our families and friends for supporting us while we worked on this project.