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Greetings from Mars

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February 1 2018 • 1 min read

Pen resting on postcard on table

Image by Mira Metzer

The Premise

I discovered that the Curiosity Rover transmitted weather data (amongst other types of data) back to Earth nearly every day. I decided that in order to have the reader understand what weather conditions are like on Mars, the data needed to be made personal. With Curiosity as my inspiration, I wrote the story from the rover’s perspective in the form of digital “postcards”. After all, the “human tradition” with postcards is to write home while on a long journey and report back on how the “weather is beautiful” and that you wished they were there. Incorporating the reader’s geo-located weather for the day and updating the data daily added more personal elements to this piece.

My Contributions

  • Writing and setup of web scraper to collect Earth and Mars weather daily
  • Story Writing
  • Front-end Development
  • Design
  • Icon creation
  • Postcard image creation
  • Social image creation

Collaborators

While I am the sole author on this project, Matt Daniels was my editor and provided helpful feedback throughout the creative process. Russell Goldenberg helped me create the Node.js and Heroku app that scraped Mars and Earth weather data daily (as well as other various coding snafus).

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