Awards & Nominations
Blue Marble has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
Mapping Space Trash in Real time
High-Level Project Summary
Since the beginning of space flight thousands of satellites have been launched into space. They have added a significant amount of debris revolving with very high velocities posing a high risk of collision with satellites in space. This creates a need to track all the waste objects in space so that we can dodge and protect the useful satellites and rocket launches. We team Blue Marble created an open-source application that displays and locates every known debris/satellite position in real-time or at any point in time in the past or future by inputting their own TLE data file, then picking out a date and time and also gives one the ability to take a snap of the globe at any point in time.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Space debris endangers space operations and could potentially limit our access to space if it's not addressed. Our project, which maps space trash in real time, addresses this concern. The web app is made for both: casual explorers and researchers. The visualization of space debris in real-time gives users an idea of actually how big the role of debris in research is.
Benefits and Features
Our project, while tracking space trash, also gives users the option to add their own debris TLE data and plot it on the globe. This feature could be very useful in space research, where researchers could plot potential debris and also not have to look for particular debris among thousands of others. Another feature we have is the UI timeline feature that allows the user to see the location of the debris at a different point in time. This feature also stops the debris from moving once the team is selected, so that detailed calculations can be made.
How We Got The Solution
- We started with WorldWind example code and chose to do our coding using JavaScript.
- Initially, we use the placemark object to locate a point on the globe and then changed its properties such as image, position, and label. This feature helped us get rid of a lot of useless code.
- We played around by animating the placemark and changing its position in a loop.
- We then added the capability to read any TLE data file and assign then it to each placemark, which will now be called a satellite.
- We used "PlacemarksAndPicking.js" to get the example code and satellite.js by Shashwat (https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js) to get the geo-coordinates from the TLE for any point in time.
- We got data from Space-Track and then uploaded it to our application.
- With a little bit of R&D, the application was ready.
Future Work
Soon, we will be working on making this project as user-friendly and effective as possible. We also dockerized the app to make the implementation of our plan easier. We also Some features we are currently working on, that will be added to the app later are as follows:
- Track the debris over a user-selected location: Taking the latitude and longitude from the user-selected location and match it with the TLE data for all space debris and satellites and at last display the number of matches we get as a result.
- Orbit-Track: We will be adding this feature to our code using the N2YO API for the same. This will allow the users to get an overview of the path of the debris.
- Debris Info: Once the user clicks on particular debris, all of its details will show on the side: Name, Current Latitude, Longitude and Altitude, and the Orbit-Track mentioned above.
- Satellites: Instead of having only debris shown on the map, we are building a code that can make the user select what they want to see: Debris, Satellites, or both. We actually tried implementing this code but faced a few bugs that couldn't be solved in the given time. Following is the screenshot of the globe when we added the satellites (before facing the bugs):
Space Agency Data
Starting with the project environment, we used NASA WorldWind. The thousands of functions that it had made coding the project easier. We then got our data from Space-Track and Celestrack. The data that we found included both satellites and debris, but since the project was about tracking debris, we erased the satellite data. This, however, gave us the idea of using the satellite data too and having the users select what data they wanted to see themselves: Debris, Satellite, or both. We did try to implement this, but faced some bugs, and could not solve it within the given time. We then used Satellite.js to de-code the TLEs and send them as input to the code.
Hackathon Journey
Our team, Blue Marble, couldn't have asked for a better experience. We found each other from various parts of this world and scratched our heads together to find the ultimate solution, nothing short of an amazing experience. Our team learned how much knowledge, effort, and innovation goes into the Space Industry and we truly appreciate it. Our inspiration was the Space Tech world where there exist pioneers of science & tech such as Elon Musk, Yuri Gagarin, etc. For the project, we wanted to create an accurate and sublime Space Debris Tracking application, and well, our team was equipped with the best teammates having great energy even during a setback which made the other teammates calm and comfortable. We would like to thank each of our teammates for their support and SpaceApps for giving us this great experience.
References
celestrack.com
space-track.org
https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
https://github.com/shashwatak/satellite-js
Tags
#MappingSpaceTrash #SpaceDebris
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.