Luna

Develop an interactive app for children that uses smart phone and tablet sensory to locate the Moon (any time of the day, even below horizon), which unlocks current lunar data (phase, distance, etc), and then presents the user options for reading a "Moon" related story, view space agency photos and videos, and/or fun facts about the Moon. The goal of this challenge is edutainment and raising awareness about lunar missions around the world.

LUNA is a desktop piece that points and track the moon in real time. Using the coupled app on your smartphone, LUNA gets your current GPS location and the moon's orbit to then calculate the the vectors and its angles to point in the right direction throughout the day and night.

Following an idea pitch to the KSC engineers, it was decided that having a hardware piece would prove to be a really cool way for kids to interact with the LUNA. The design was to be a device for children that enlightens them on the whereabouts of the moon and its orbit around us. Added with its capability to project the moon onto their bedroom wall, they would experience seeing the moon move along its orbit across their bedroom throughout the night.

The mechanism of the device works off the spherical coordinate system where the needle or arrow would point towards an object by varying two angles of rotation, one about the base of the device and another about the centre of the arrow.

LUNA would have the capability to track objects other than the moon such as the sun and ISS.

SOLIDWORKS, Android Studio