Space Sharks

Tampa, FL | What on Earth is Synthetic Aperture Radar?

SAR for beginners

High-Level Project Summary

Our challenge was to explain SAR technology and its capabilities to non-experts through a 2-5 min video. Our team developed an original, creative, and comprehensible video to explain SAR technology more easily. Our project solves the challenge since we explained SAR functions and features in simple terms instead of using only technical terms used by the scientific community. Our project is important because it enables people to know how this technology works. Information that can be difficult to process. Moreover, it let people know about a technology that has been out there contributing to their life.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fRm_2fmJxqDlktrPjZDsMjX703C6YvBmkeFlXysgUOI/edit?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iBDqqHwAopsXIUHHjeiDo1qedqMsRsnY/view?usp=sharing

Detailed Project Description

Our project involves a video explaining Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). The principal benefit of our project is the availability of information to enhance the knowledge and importance of this kind of satellite. This project simplifies the complex concept of SAR to educate a wider audience about its uses and advantages.

What our project is hoping to achieve is to describe in simple terms the functionality of SAR for the understanding of the public. We narrowed down the specifics about SAR and stated the accomplishments that have been achieved due to the information acquired through its utilization.

The tools we employed were Adobe Premier and Procreate.

Space Agency Data

The data we used from NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) gave us information about the SAR, what is it, its functions, and its applications. We found some posters from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to explain some applications. Moreover, we employed information from the Canadian government about the RADARSAT-1 and some observations of Antarctica. We also employed information from an investigation called RADARSAT-1 Antarctic Mapping Project (RAMP) on the same topic to get a better perspective of the several uses of SAR.

Hackathon Journey

As a team, it was our first experience in a NASA competition. We came up with great ideas that we tried to make fit to make our project. We learned about SAR, how it works, its applications, its functionality, some missions, and even we saw several images taken by some satellites with this technology. Furthermore, I think we learned to work as a team. We learned to listen to each other, organize ourselves, be more empathetic, and keep our motivation towards our goal.

The approach we took to fulfill the objective of this project was to divide the searching for information, analyze it, and then try to put it in words that were easy to understand to make the video. The setbacks we found were that we did not know about satellites and radars. Also, the documents we found were complex and some videos were too long and difficult to understand. We were in the same position as the problem that the challenge tried to solve. To solve these challenges, we kept looking for other information, and we also explained it to each other to understand it better.