CAS Project

NASA Hunch

Investigation: On the NASA Hunch website, there are multitudes of projects that people can take on. After deliberating with each other, we decided to go for a purely software approach, the Cosmic Calendar, a website designed to be able to tell time between different celestial objects like planets and moons where people could possibly be living on in the future.

Plan: Our plan was to first create a plan-- we listed out the features that we needed to do, from frontend to backend. We also researched intensively into how different websites and programs tell time, the concept of time itself, the definition of a second, as well as how we'd calculate and display the time.

Why: The most appealing part of this project is the fact that we'll be able to contribute to NASA; our program has the opportunity to make it up to the ISS. Otherwise though, I thought it would be a fun study into time in itself, as well as a reason to learn and grow my programming skills.

Purpose:

Scheduling events across the various celestial worlds in space holds quite a few challenges and TerraChronos, our project, aims to resolve these issues. After evaluating the differing timezones, calendars, and day lengths, this application will both convert user-inputted time as well as display a relevant calendar in accordance to the users’ preferences.

Planning:

We initially spent multiple nights on call, discussing the scope of our project and our goals on September 30th, creating our schedule and due dates on October 3rd, and discussing further planning on website design and technology. There was then a big skip between 10/03 and 10/28 in terms of progress on the project as the schoolwork cycle came to a close and major projects were due, however, on October 28th, we were given a 3-day notice of a presentation we'd have to give on October 30th to NASA Engineers to give preliminary reviews on our project. With three days left, we decided to meet up at Julian's house to make some major progress on the project.

The first three images display my own notes and planning sheets that I created for the October 3rd meeting, while the latter two images were created on the Figma program as an initial design before the October 28th meetings.

First Meeting: 9/30

As we were warned that other districts competing with us in this project had started months ago, we realized we should probably start on the project soon or else we'd be even more behind. I called for a meeting, and we conducted our first online meeting discussing our goals and the extent to which we should perform our project. We brainstormed what exactly we wanted to include besides the required 'time conversion' and 'calendar' mechanic, and we planned for our next meeting to be on 10/03.

Second Meeting: 10/03

Julian got us started with the website stack and Arnov the research as I finished up some planning sheets. We went with NextJS, a website building framework that'd give us more control over the elements of the website, and Tailwind CSS for our design. We also started researching, and surprisingly, Wikipedia pages became my best friend! The information on websites were usually undetailed, while the research papers on JSTOR were unwieldy to read through. We also found very useful data sheets from NASA, and we researched the different methods by which time is counted (TAI vs UTC vs UT1) (this was the most confusing part).

Third Meeting: 10/05

After establishing at least some form of knowledge on our methods and goals, we started familiarizing ourselves with the technology we were going to use. Though I had experience in Tailwind CSS, I was much less familiar with NextJS, and since my computer just had its data wiped, I also had to reinstall a lot of the software I needed like Visual Studio Code, the NPM package manager, and the Git software. We had to also do this for Arnav as well, but Julian already had his computer set up so he was fine.

Trifold and Brochure Due Date: 10/11

Our first due date was looming up upon us: we needed to have the slides for our trifold as well as a brochure ready. Over 10/9 to 10/11, I created a plain presentation discussing our methods and objectives in Google Slides, before copying the text over to our brochure on the Canva online editing program. With Arnav having made documentation on our progress, we were set for this part of our journey.

Emergency Meeting: 10/28

On a bright cold Monday morning, we were informed that there was a very important event coming up on Wednesday 10/30, where engineers from NASA would come over so we could present to them our preliminary ideas. This was the PDR, or the Preliminary Design Review, and we had neither a presentation nor a product. Fortunately, we had just gotten many large stones from our classwork out of the way and we all had free time to spend on Tuesday night working on the project. We decided that we would meet up on 10/29 at Julian's house after finishing the schoolwork of the week on 10/28.

Don't Panic, everything is under control and manageable: 10/29

We were delivered the black trifold we were to use some time ago, and we so all we needed to do was to create the trifold. That is a statement that is more simply said than done, and we toiled for hours creating an immaculate design for our project.

That afternoon, we also made significant progress in our actual website product. Since I had made a Figma design of our product around 10/19, all we had to do was to put it into actual code. Arnav put in our theme colors and I helped him finish up the front-end as Julian worked away at the log-in system for the backend.

Preliminary Design Review: 10/30

We met a lot of amazing individuals that, after we gave the overview of our design to, they commented on our product and our presentation. We also had the chance to learn a lot about what the other teams were doing and how they were going about it, even though many of them weren't doing the same Cosmic Calendar project as we were. It was a long day, but ultimately, it was a fun learning experience.

We realized that we had to have some kind of X factor that would set us apart from the other teams doing our same project. Having a product in itself was the baseline, as well as the calendar system and time conversion tool itself. The log-in system is a pretty basic idea as well. From the PDR though, I saw how the one other team there was getting attention for having support for people with disabilities, so we began considering that as we continued our project. I also saw another team who was doing a separate project make their own keyboard and interface powered by a Raspberry Pi server and I wondered if we could also host our own server on someone's Linux computer to power our website. This server would be connected to a NTP server, increasing accuracy of the time presented. With that, we'd also have to have a fix or display for latency. We could also do research into how scientists calculate rotation speed versus time of day and allow people to create their own custom calendars, or consider the effects of time dilation (since time is relative) (did you know that people on the ISS are 0.014 seconds younger than people on Earth per year they spend on the ISS).

After the PDR, we didn't add a lot to our project other than a bit of discussion and research until the final week of school, despite how updated versions of our brochures and presentation were due around the end of November. We wanted to change our presentation and brochure in accordance to developments we've made in our product, but since we hadn't made any developments, we decided not to submit anything as of yet.

Our product will likely be completed before January 22 February 25.