Disseminating Science with NASA's Solar System Treks
Abstract
NASA's Solar System Treks Project produces a suite of online, interactive visualization and analysis portals. These tools enable mission planners, planetary scientists, students, educators, and the general public to access data products from a wide range of instruments aboard a variety of past and current missions, for a growing number of planetary bodies. As new missions are being planned to a variety of planetary bodies, these tools are facilitating the public's understanding of the missions and engaging the public in the process of identifying and selecting where these missions will land. The Solar System Treks Project serves as an infrastructure component to NASA Science Mission Directorate's Science Activation Program engaging learners of all ages.
There are now seven web portals in the program available to the public. This expanded list includes portals for the Moon, Mars, Vesta, Ceres, and Titan. Icy Moons Trek features seven of Saturn's smaller icy moons. The latest addition is the new Mercury Trek portal. All of these are unified under a new project home site with supporting content. As web-based toolsets, the portals do not require users to purchase or install any software beyond current standard web browsers. The portals of the Solar System Treks provide outstanding capabilities for scientists to share their work with each other and with the general public. This sharing can take several forms. Scientists whose results take the form of mapped data products can have their products considered for integration into the appropriate portals. They benefit from having their data disseminated to a wide, diverse audience and by having their data being presented in the context of other complementary data products. Researchers can also use the portals to generate visualizations and tell stories about their research that can be presented using the Trek clients or that can be ported to a wide range of media and venues. Missions can commission new portals for planetary bodies that they are studying so that they can highlight their mission and their results. In this presentation we will show examples of how the Solar System Treks facilitate the sharing of research data with the public in a way that allows the public to work with the data in exciting and engaging ways.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMED11D0888D
- Keywords:
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- 0840 Evaluation and assessment;
- EDUCATION;
- 0845 Instructional tools;
- EDUCATION;
- 1974 Social networks;
- INFORMATICS