Our project aims to create an engaging, interactive web application that allows its users to visualize and understand how meteor impacts can impact our lives on Earth and also learn how we identify these objects and possible mitigation strategies and ultimately raise awareness about this topic that is not discussed enough. We hope to accomplish this through our website that combines modern visuals, 3D and 2D visualization tools, and engaging narrative to create an intuitive experience for all users. To accomplish this, we garnered data from NASA and other sources to create our models and predictions. Only by community engagement and awareness can we mitigate the dangers that these extraterrestrial objects impose on Earth and its population; that's why we believe our project can have a global impact to further advance this objective.
Disclaimer: For a better user experience, we recommend you run your project on a desktop with the tested browsers: Google Chrome, Firefox, and Brave.
Our group is composed of 6 computer engineering students from Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP) that wanted to take a chance at a NASA hackathon. Our project will take its user through a narrative starting from a warning that a meteor is on a collision course with Earth and tasks the user with taking a course on these objects and mitigation strategies.
After that, we can choose to take the Beware of the Rocks Training Course and look at an interactive simulation of Earth. There we can create meteors and see their trajectories. We also can choose to go to an Earth meteor impact simulation where we can define the parameters of the meteor that will impact Earth and where it lands, displaying a lot of statistics about the impact, including stats like the size of the crater and the force of the impact. The course is the recommended way to experience the project for the first time.
There we will start the course with a simulation of the Near Earth Objects (NEOs), where we can see any NEO that are near us and information about them.
After that we have an interactive gallery about ways that we can identify these objects and learn about them.
After that we are taken to the Earth Impact Simulation, where we can visualize the consequences of a direct impact and associated statistics about it.
Finally we have a last presentation about ways that we can mitigate these collisions, so we can raise awareness about these ideas that may help humanity in the future.
This is an interactive simulation that the user can choose the following parameters for the impact:
- Meteor Diameter
- Meteor Speed
- Angle Of Impact
- Material of the Meteor
- Localization of the Impact
After that we can visualize the following impact statistics:
- Crater Size and Depth
- Blast Zones
- Energy of Impact
- Deaths Estimatives
This is an interactive simulation that the user can see how earth orbits the sun, and he can choose to add meteors to the space and observe how it's orbit would behave.
We expect that after experiencing our project, the users will have a deeper understanding of the NEOs and its dangers and also more educated about ways of mitigation about them. All this in hopes that the global community will have more awareness about this topic so that we as a species can continue thriving in our only world.
We hope that our project will be of great help to promote knowledge and raise awareness about Meteors, and to help in this journey, we have tought of next steps that couldn't be implemented due to the time restraints:
- Mobile Port to help bring Beware Of the Rocks to more people worldwide
- Support to other languages than English
- Bigger Meteor Orbit Simulation with other planets and more advanced physics
Our project was built using JavaScript and React to build the webpages. We heavily used Three.JS for the Meteor Orbit Simulation and Cesium for te Earth Impact Simulation. We also used Photopea, Beepbox, Suno and Gemini AI Image Generator to help with the visual, effects and sounds.
In this project we used intensively AI tools to help us with code generation, code revision, image generation, sound generation and others. We mainly used the following LLMs: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini.