Awards & Nominations
Space Garbage Collectors has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Global Nominee
3D-Visualization of the space debris and satellites
High-Level Project Summary
Have you seen Gravity? This movie is the worst case scenario. Even though it's not accurate in a scientific way, it depicts the danger starting from debrits. Therefore we chose to create a 3D visualization of the space trash with a tracking of the space. Furthermore we have implemented a forecast of orbits and based on this calculation we have elaborated a collision detection. A crucial opportunity in this project is the space trash collection routing, which helps capturing and conciously burning up the space trash by reentry and cleaning our outer space.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
We formulated our challenge to 3D visualization of space debris and satellites.
It visualizes the globe with the orbiting debris and satellites.
We hope to achieve a tool to visualy diplay space trash an satellites and their orbits in realtime as well as a proven collision prediction.
Our mission was to rise the awareness of the ecocide.
To get the data we used a phyton3 script.
The UI was created via with the use of React JS.
The Visualization is used via BabylonJS. A open source 3D rendering engine for the Web. The biggest challenge was to visualize and update 10000+ Debris in real time. This was done via the use of 3D-Model Instances and smartly loading and unloading Models.
The current position of a space debris is calculated with the satellite.js library, based on the TLE data and the set time. As the earth in our UI is stationary, the provided ECI coordinates are converted into ECF coordinates. The orbital trail consists of multiple points in time past before the current position, several seconds apart from each other, which are the connected with increasing transparent line meshes.
Space Agency Data
Our beautiful mapping layer is wrapped in a NASA Earth Vision.
Stuffin.space inspired us but we wanted more. We created our own webapp and enhanced it with a collision warning system and a nice infopanel.
Doing some researches over the danger of debris and the possibilities of reducing the space trash we excessivly used the NASA data and publications.
Following the recommendations of the challenge we used Celestrack to track and grab our data.
Hackathon Journey
Once upon a time there were five friends, watching the nightsky on the walk home.
"What do you think is out there?", one asked.
"Endlessness, other lifeforms and undiscovered beauties" second replied.
"Trash and death", third jokingly replied.
Even it was a joke, trash was not so far-fetched. Approx. 4000 satellites are orbiting around our earth, but a frightening number of 768.000 space debris (larger than 1 cm) are wandering around. This fact shocked us. And we had to deepen our knowledge.
As one of our teammates found the Nasa Space App Challenge and this Mapping of space trash challenge we could do nothing but participating. Every one of us had his own ideas of what to create and how to use it.
At the start of the Nasa Space App Challenge we brainstormed and quickly found our mission. We wanted a technical challenge which can help people and rise awareness of the happening ecocide. The technical challenge happened to be getting a nice dataset of the debris, its orbit, and the performance optimization for the rendering and the collision prediction. As most websites focus on satellites and their orbits, we chose to depict the debris. We got many visions for our webapp and their enhancements.
We implemented a nice looking globe with a mapping layer. On this we added the debris, satellites and their orbits. But we haven't stopped there. We added a collision warning system (which might even send you pushnotifications. but who got the time for that on a hackaton) and a good looking infopanel with many usefull data. With this fully functional 3D-visualization of debris and satellites our journey ended due to outrunning time.
But we have got so many more visions. We could furthermore implement a filter to distingish between size, originator and incoming collisions. Another vision for the User Interface is our so called skywatch. You can select a location and see what is flying above your head. The AR/VR implementation might be a nice feature to the project but due to the short development period we did not pursue the idea. An other interesting idea was the reentry forecast, this happen to be physicaly demanding as many objects and their mutual display had to be taken into consideration. Due to lack of time we were not able to manage to implement the reentry.
Throught the journey of the hackaton the reach of space pollution by debris grew inside us. Even if or precisely because this hackaton is technically influentional we had to come up with a rise of awareness. We do not only pollute our planet but also the outer space.
Without this challenge we would never have realised how much debris surrounds our world.
References
https://celestrak.com
https://www.space-track.org/auth/login
BabylonJS
React JS
Satellite JS
https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/collection/1484/blue-marble
Tags
#spacetrash, #collisionwarning, #forecast, #backcast, #awareness, #visualization, #spacedebris, #satellites
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.