NASA Hunch PDR

10/30/2024 - Creative

The NASA Hunch Preliminary Design Review is a science-fair like conference where students who are participating in NASA Hunch must display and present their designs to NASA engineers to receive feedback on their design and presentation. The STEAM center was hosting such a conference for many different schools in the area, which I thought was fun. The issue, however, lied in the fact that the participants were not notified of the PDR until the Monday of the week. The PDR was set to happen on Wednesday. Fortunately, I didn't have much homework, and whatever I did have, I finished on Monday to have time on Tuesday to work on the project. I sent out a notice to my two team members of this emergency, and we planned to work on the project somewhere together on Tuesday night. We ended up heading to Julian's house and spent the whole afternoon finishing up our first design, our brochure, and our trifold. We picked a yellow and monochrome theme, worked through bugs together, and refined a design. 

The next day, we headed up to STEAM in the morning and presented all day. I learned a lot about creating and doing a good presentation, as well as walked around a bit to learn about others' projects. I took photos to use as reference for when we'll create the next rendition of our tri-fold and brochure, as well as discussed with my team members the next step of our development.

LO6: Our NASA Hunch Project is to create a cosmic calendar, where people living on different planets will be able to use these times to coordinate events like mission launch and deadlines. While this seems like a simple task of calculation, the more we researched into the topic, the more we realized the mountain of work at our hands. For one, time is relative; the faster someone is traveling, the slower they experience time (absolute clocks on the ISS will be around 0.014 seconds behind clocks on earth per year). We also had to take into consideration timezones and sleeping schedules; since we're deciding the length of day of each celestial object, we needed to make sure that people are sleeping and awake for healthy hours, especially for celestial objects with days far shorter than Earth (like Ceres). Finally, we realized how inconsistent a single day is on Earth, because Earth is gradually spinning slower, thus days are longer. This posed issues for us, as this means that we can't use Earth's day as a reference point. We also looked into the 2036 issue, where 32-bit computers are no longer able to count up time, reaching the integar limit (computers physically can not store values past this particular number).

Aim; Comms/Creative; Time; Investigation; Value; Engagement