Set Your Sights High!

    The Challenge

    NASA builds and operates numerous satellite and airborne missions that deliver critical measurements and data to the world’s science community. Your challenge is to develop a tool that enables people to identify NASA satellites and satellite instruments as they fly over their locations on Earth. Help people explore the data and applications coming from the instruments overhead!

    Background

    NASA’s Earth Science Division builds and operates many satellite and airborne missions that deliver critical measurements and data about our home planet to the world’s science communities. Currently, over 20 missions and many more instruments on satellites and the International Space Station help us to understand Earth’s atmospheric composition, weather and atmospheric dynamics, climate variability and change, water and energy cycle, carbon cycle and ecosystems, and the Earth’s surface and interior.

    In addition, the Earth Science Division’s Airborne Science Program provides manned and unmanned aircraft used in research field campaigns to observe Earth’s changes, obtain data for modeling activities, test and refine new instrument technology, and calibrate satellite instruments.

    At any hour, NASA instruments are hard at work, collecting data over oceans, land masses, ice, and everything in between. NASA’s Earth Science Applied Sciences Program helps identify innovative applications for these data that aid decision-making on Earth, thereby helping to improve quality of life and strengthen our global economy.

    Potential Considerations

    • Your ‘Earth observers’ tour guide could be an app that sends out real time-alerts for ISS or satellite-flybys, helps pinpoint instrument locations in the sky, and share information about how data from the instrument are used.
    • Be creative in how you engage users to learn more about the instrument, its path, its data, and how those data may have been applied in the users’ own lives!