NASA Space Apps Challenge – Sandglass

Inspired by the NASA Space Apps competition and its themes from previous years, Sandglass offers an interactive and interesting way to learn about universal expansion. Since its creation in 2012, the Space Apps competition has inspired hundreds of thousands of individuals to create solutions to challenges in the fields of Earth and space science and technology. Hosted annually in October, participants from 150+ countries contribute solutions to NASA’s challenges, which are released at the beginning of the event weekend and typically give participants two days to develop their solutions.
Though our project was not created to solve a specific challenge from the competition, it was inspired by solutions from previous years to resemble the type of project that would be created for the Space Apps competition, though more in depth thanks to the longer development time available. Because of this, our team’s project experience was different than most. There was no official client for our project, and so we were given free reign to come up with the requirements and features of Sandglass, with the help of our professor and surrogate client. This had its advantages and disadvantages; the team was able to determine its own creative vision for the project, and communication was streamlined without the need to coordinate schedules with a client. However, this meant additional time needed to be spent researching potential projects and the best medium to express these projects while other teams had already received expectations from clients. Surprisingly, even this turned into an unexpected additional advantage, since it made collaboration and communication within the team paramount from the very beginning and helped us to define strengths and roles later on.
This of course culminated in the creation of what Sandglass would become: an educational tool targeted at youth aged 12-17 that, with the help of NASA’s exoplanet archive database, demonstrates the time it would take for an exoplanet to leave Earth’s observable universe and, in doing so, disappear from our sky forever. Users are able to filter through a list of more than 5000 exoplanets to see a visualization animation that shows information about the selected planet and its movement through space. The application also presents the expansion algorithm developed by the team and explains how it is used to produce our results.
All in all, the project was a great learning experience for the team. Resourcefulness, adaptability, and problem solving were key qualities for the unique project experience that we underwent. We were also able to develop new technical skills; Python, the language Sandglass was developed in, was new to our entire team. Our team also had no prior experience developing animation, something that was required for the visualization aspect of the application. This experience has surely provided new and improved skills that the members of our team will be able to carry forward into future endeavors.