Sharyn Horowitz << back to resume

Project: "Rosetta" Illustration

Client: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Role: Concept, Project Management

Challenge: Portray a complex vision for sharing information

NASA's mission information is distributed among multiple centers and outside organizations. Vast quantities of data stream down from spacecraft, joining an Earthly mound of status reports, educational materials, press releases, and dozens of other types of information. Some missions do an excellent job of sharing this information with other entities, and some don't. Simple things like a launch date, which often changes frequently in the months leading up to launch, rapidly get out of sync.

As the supervisory directorate for all of NASA's missions except the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, the Science Mission Directorate handles much of this information the old-fashioned way, through PowerPoint and email. My team is proposing a radical (for NASA) plan for integrating mission information, and this animation is meant to demonstrate it.

The animation is designed to be "talked to" so a bit of explanation is needed. It begins with a global view of all of the Science Mission Directorate's missions, grouped by the responsible organization. At the top left is a representation of "Rosetta," the information management system behind the internal and external websites.

On clicking the play button at the lower right, you will see the Cassini-Huygens mission come to the forefront. Various squares of different sizes and intensity appear. These represent websites and applications, both internal and external, that have information about this mission. The size represents the amount of information, and the intensity represents the quality. Example content buckets appear on the right. Pieces of paper represent useful information that can be drawn from the sites, and on the next click these papers fly into the buckets to represent a system of sharing information. These buckets slide over and demonstrate how versions of the information are distributed to NASA audiences.