High-Level Project Summary
Space debris poses a great risk to future space travel and innovations. Assessing the challenge that space debris poses to future space travel begins with locating and tracking. To accomplish this, we developed a geospatial app that tracks all space debris in real time. Creating a platform with this information could aid in avoiding collisions with space debris while increasing the public's awareness on the scale of this issue.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
The space trash tracker provides 3D, geospatial visuals that represent space debris and satellites currently orbiting our planet. It works utilizing TLEs (two-line element sets) that are obtained by querying Celestrak and Space-Track. After obtaining the TLEs, the application utilizes Satellite.js to parse relevant information such as position and velocity. This information is then passed into an open-source geospatial visualizer, Cesium, and displayed in a way that can be digested by average users. The web application was developed with JavaScript, Node JS, HTML, and CSS. This program offers a potential solution to avoid damage from collision with space debris and satellites. We hope that this web application will provide a means to show the current severity of pollution by debris in space and inspire innovators to tackle the challenge of eliminating space debris.
Link to live web application: Space Trash Tracker.
Space Agency Data
We used Celestrak and Space-Track to obtain our data through recommendation from the challenge prompt. We found that these platforms were a great resource for us because they were easily decipherable and included additional information to help understand the data.
Hackathon Journey
Space Apps challenged our team to dive into the topic of full stack web application. We showed up for this with little experience in web application development, and none of us knew how to code in JavaScript. A portion of our team members have never participated in a hackathon before. Because we came to the table with such little knowledge of the technologies that are used to accomplish this, our confidence, creativity, and problem-solving abilities were tested and nurtured this weekend. We learned a lot about working in a team development environment as well as working better under time constraints for completing a project Our team learned about working with package managers and module bundlers, working with multiple frameworks at once and properly passing data between them, and we collectively increased both the breadth and depth of our JavaScript and Node JS knowledge. The learning curve is steep for these technologies but developing with them in a sprint seems to be a great way of learning. It was challenging and rewarding to go through iterations of a product and approach something that finally worked. We would like to thank NASA for hosting this event, allowing us to participate, and providing us inspiration through the challenge prompts. We would also like to thank the Milky Way Tech Hub for providing an amazing space for us to collaborate as a team in person, giving us the chance to publicly present our project, providing support and encouragement to us throughout our journey, and feeding us delicious food!
References
Celestrak, Space-Track, Node JS, VS Code, Github, Satellite JS, Vanilla JS, European Space Agency (Powerpoint graphic)
Tags
#spacetrash #spacedebris #spacetravel #geospatial #satellite
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.