SpaceLaunchPad

Cleveland, OH | Unlocking the Secrets of the Sun

Space Launchpad

High-Level Project Summary

We created a TikTok channel, its focus is to disseminate information and improve public awareness about space exploration, physics, astronomy, medicine, etc. using short-form video content. For this challenge, we made our first two videos about two solar missions: The Parker Space Probe and the Solar Orbiter. These videos describe the state and purpose of these missions as well as why the findings are crucial for our understanding of the solar system, cosmology, and other astrophysical phenomena. Our channel is important because there is a distinct lack of scientifically literate space content on TikTok, arguably the most important social media for interacting with the youngest generations.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://youtu.be/H25R5bCoK0E

Link to Final Project

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMRwPmnuh/

Detailed Project Description

Our project is a TikTok channel that promotes awareness of space missions and space science, we call it SpaceLaunchPad. The videos we post on the Tiktok are short, usually around one minute long, and communicate the important details about the solar mission with nice graphics, text, and a video/audio recording of one of our team members speaking about the mission.

We focused our first two videos on the Parker Solar Probe and the Solar Orbiter missions for the challenge. In the future, we hope to expand our channel to speak about other ambitious satellite/telescope missions, relativity, cosmology, human performance in space, we see no limit. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to do a media format of some sort, whether that be a Website, Youtube, TikTok, or other media platform. We pondered over what we wanted our audience to be, and we decided that appealing to a younger audience would be the best. We want to inspire the next generation of astronomers, space engineers, astrophysicists, space psychologists, etc. We want to cast a wide net with our content. We thought about what format would be best to reach a younger audience, and it was clear that we thought TikTok was the best format. Millennials and Gen Z kids have grown up with technology and social media for most if not all of their lives so they have much lower attention spans. We realized that in order not to bore them, we must deliver our content in a way that is entertaining and concise. Tiktok made perfect sense. In the future, we hope to continue making content and continue to expose young people, or whoever else is interested, to the world of space exploration, sciences, arts, etc. We did not code anything ourselves for this project since we are using TikTok to disseminate our videos, but one of our group members is quite good with Adobe Illustrator and she designed our logo. In the future, we think she will be able to make other graphics for our future videos.

Space Agency Data

Since our project was primarily involving purely factual information concerning telescope projects, the majority of our information came from NASA and ESA sites. In the future, we hope to use a larger number of scientific data sources to make our videos even more interesting and involve a diverse set of space disciplines.

Hackathon Journey

It was quite helpful because my friends and I wanted to do something similar to the project we did for the challenge for a while, and this challenge gave us the motivation to do it. The goal of the challenge was to improve public awareness of space projects, which is exactly what we wanted to do in the first place. We learned a lot about what type of artistic decisions go into making short scientific awareness videos, as well as what type of research goes into them. We split up tasks for the project, some members did research, some members recorded the TikTok, some members focused on the other administrative tasks of the project. We did not have any significant setbacks so that was quite nice.