BearTual

México City | Mapping Space Trash in Real Time

SpaceBear

High-Level Project Summary

Space exploration is affected by space debris caused mainly by human activity, however, it is a problem that can grow to the point of making space exploration difficult or even putting an end to it, it is important to raise awareness and make known the severity of this trouble. To do this, we created the “SpaceBear” project, an interactive web page that allows users to view the position of space debris detected by NASA in real-time.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH2eWADMTzE

Link to Final Project

https://thepresidentm.github.io/SpaceBear/

Detailed Project Description

📃Description

SpaceBear is an interactive website where Internet users can consult a globe with the current positions of space debris in real-time, as well as consult information about the space debris problem. This makes it easier for people interested in this problem to access information on the problem and encourage the development of creative solutions.

👨‍💻Development

Our interactive web page is made entirely with JavaScript, using the Node JS development framework and two libraries that were provided by NASA, which are Nasa's WorldWind which was used for the implementation and interaction of the globe, and Celestrak which helps us to obtain each of the data from space debris in Earth orbit. For development, we use GitHub which made collaborative work easier for us.

Space Agency Data

📡How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

To carry out this project we use different types of digital resources and information:

Celestrak was used to obtain each of the data related to space debris located in Earth's orbit so that we could implement the information to the frontend.
Nasa's World Wind is an open-source tool that was used for the implementation and interaction of the virtual globe.

We made our own API developed with nodeJS which transforms the TLE data that we needed into JSON files which helped us to show the trash in NASA's WorldWind globe. This API has been deployed in this URL: https://datajson.herokuapp.com

Hackathon Journey

The space apps event is the first hackathon in which we participated and we are happy with this experience, during these days we were forced to learn new programming paradigms, work as a team, and demonstrate that together we can achieve our goals. Our registration to the challenge was peculiar and thanks to our colleague Luis Fernando we decided to try to solve one of the proposed challenges, being our first contest of this type, we decided to go for a problem in which we could apply our programming knowledge and that had an interesting problem for us, so we chose MAPPING SPACE WASTE IN REAL TIME, this problem has multiple approaches, however, we emphasize on what we believe is the most important, the scientific dissemination, now, the fundamental thing is to identify the positive and negative aspects of the problem. As for the project process, we solved setbacks and problems as we went along, always being empathetic and responsible with the team members and with the project.

Our thanks to our families who helped us to be what we are today and who have given us all the essentials to develop our knowledge in what we like the most, Also thanks to NASA for creating this type of event and motivating us to learn and create a scientific culture.