High-Level Project Summary
We developed an open-source geospatial application that displays and locates every known debris object orbiting Earth in real time. Our tool has easy to user interface that allows anyone easily interact with tool.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Our tool offers a very user friendly and easy to use interface to interact with space debris locations in real time. Users can scroll time forward or backward to see all future or previous trajectories and conjunctions.
Steps we performed to build our tool:
1) We got data from Space-track project in 3LE format
2) We removed "0 " to convert 3LE to TLE
3) We used python library pyorbital to get lat, long and alt from TLE in real time
4) We wrote backend code on python library Flask to generate positions in future and in past
5) We send this data to our UI written in JavaScript library React
6) We used 3D globe model from https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov
All our code is available at debris.paymona.com/code
In future we want to add ability to view sky from position on Earth and watch all debris passing above.
Also we want to add data on smaller debris for which exact locations are not known and only approximate positions could be calculated.
Space Agency Data
Hackathon Journey
Our team wanted to learn working with processing big data sets in real time. This challenge was a perfect opportunity for us to use our skills in programming and learn new ways in working with data. We never had any experience in working with geo data or with location of objects in space. None of us new that TLE data format is used to store data about objects in Earth orbit. This challenge made us expand our data processing abilities by giving us new types of data to work with. We also learnt a lot about Earth orbit and seriousness of space debris problem. We now know what is geosynchronous and geostationary orbit, we know that there is an actual "graveyard orbit" for non-functioning satellites. We are glad that we worked on this challenge and had an opportunity to learn so much.
On top of main challenge we encountered some other obstacles in our two day journey. Just before the star of hackathon one of our core developers had a family emergency and couldn't participate. Other team members had to learn to write his part of code. It added extra difficulty for us. On the second day our troubles grew and we lost internet connection in our office for whole day. We had to move all our equipment two times to different locations.
But in the end we did it. We submitted our project on time!
References
https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/web/
https://www.space-track.org/#recent
Tags
#spacejunk #debris #Earth
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.