“A Spacecraft For All” is a Chrome Experiment that follows the amazing 36 year journey of the International Sun/Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) spacecraft. Our team worked closely with the space scientists at Project ISEE-3 Reboot, who formed to revive the spacecraft on its journey back to Earth for the benefit of citizen science. You can read the entire story here.
On “A Spacecraft for All” you can watch an interactive documentary of its odyssey in WebGL over film, read its live instrument data, and view a live simulation of it’s position and trajectory in our solar system.
And on August 10th, 2014 as the ISEE-3 made a long-awaited pass of the Moon, we held a Live Lunar Flyby event webcast for the entire world (detail below).
Please visit the site for the full interactive experience here, and make sure you are using Chrome.
The site tells the entire story of the ISEE-3 from it's original launch in 1978, through missions in orbit and chasing comets, to being decommissioned by NASA, to re-activating with the help of Project Reboot, to it's route past our Moon, all with WebGL over film and constant interaction throughout. You can also read it's live data, and see it's current position.
The interactive film tells the ISEE-3 with a web storytelling first - WebGL layered over documentary footage - so people can interact with the story throughout. The film is broken up into five chapters spanning throughout the spacecraft's years. This example of the film doesn't accurately show the interactive nature of the site, because it's running on a video player. Visit the site for the real interactive version.
On August 10th, 2014 we held a Live Lunar Flyby Google Hangout event at Team Reboot's McMoon Headquarters in California. The hour and half event brought together team members, scientists from around the world, tv space personalities, with special guests the ex-NASA ISEE-3 scientists from it's original launch. As viewers watched the webcast, they could see the ISEE-3 pass the moon with a live flyby demo on the site.
We made an official patch and poster for the team to mark this historic project.
Creative Lab worked with the scientists at Project Reboot, who had the crazy idea to revive an old spacecraft for citizen science, and made this all possible.
We launched the website days before the lunar flyby, and immediately the world shared the story. So far It has generated 100 million global social impressions with mentions in NY Times, Gizmodo, FastCo Design, Popular Mechanics, Mashable, The Next Web, Engadget, and many more.
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