High-Level Project Summary
We developed an application that maps and displays the location of every known debris object orbiting Earth on a map in real-time. It satisfies all the requirements as per the challenge statement.Orbital debris includes nonfunctional spacecraft, abandoned launch vehicle stages, mission-related debris, and fragmentation debris. They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage satellites and spacecraft. Hence debris management is very important and mapping them is a prime step.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
For this project, we used the python interpreter to create a desktop application that reads a file with the TLE data of thousands of orbital objects and using the Python Ephem module we accurately calculate the position of each object in the list in real time and then graphically display a map of the world and the location of objects on it. It is very user friendly and will definitely contribute to the management of space trash.
Space Agency Data
Data and details on Space Debris has been taken from NASA ,ESA and other open sources and incorporated into the project. The links are also attached below:
- https://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris
- https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/news/orbital_debris.html
- http://celestrak.com/
- https://www.space-track.org/
Hackathon Journey
Participation in Space Apps was a once in lifetime, memorable experience.
We not only learned about space trash, mapping space trash using Python but also developed several soft skills such as communications, networking, teamwork, and personality development.
The growing population of space debris has increased the potential danger to all spacecraft, and even the International Space Station and other spacecraft with astronauts on board, such as SpaceX's Crew Dragon. We were trying to develop solutions to this, and at that time got this golden opportunity from NASA to create an application to map space debris. Thus we chose this challenge.
We tried to develop a user-friendly application that could display and locate all known Earth-orbiting space debris on a map.
First of all, since each of us is from different locations and time zones, communication issues were a challenge. Shortage of time was another problem faced. While developing the project, we also faced several challenges, however, all of these were resolved with cooperation, understanding, research, and resources from NASA.
References
- https://www.python.org/
- https://pypi.org/project/pyephem/
- https://www.pygame.org/wiki/about
- http://celestrak.com/
- https://www.space-track.org/
Tags
#spacetrash #debris #app #map
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.