Space Trash Pandas

Cleveland, OH | Mapping Space Trash in Real Time

Space Trash Pandas

High-Level Project Summary

Our planet is currently being orbited by hundreds of thousands of debris pieces. Though not apparently harmful, these small slivers of debris can cause significant damage. There exist websites with programs and graphics that track space debris. However, there are some improvements and suggestions that we have for the software. We'd like the software to illustrate the risk each debris poses by color. We'd also like to be able to pick a satellite or space station and have information centered on that object instead of on earth. For our project, we will make a 2D demo of our ideas. It contains multiple spacecraft orbiting earth with data from various pieces of debris.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://github.com/amitofsk/spacetrashpanda/blob/main/SpaceTrashPands.pdf

Link to Final Project

https://github.com/amitofsk/spacetrashpanda

Detailed Project Description

Engineers building weather satellites, astronauts going to the International Space Station, scientists studying earth’s weather, and many other researchers are interested in tracking space debris. We looked at existing tools for monitoring space debris, and then we wrote a 2D simulation to illustrate features we’d like added to better help these users.

We wrote the code in C++ using the Qt graphics library. Our code is available on github, and a windows executable version of the code is available at https://github.com/amitofsk/spacetrashpanda/tree/main/build-Space_Simulation-Desktop_Qt_5_15_2_MinGW_64_bit-Release/release/Space_Simulation.exe

The program we wrote shows the progression of the International Space Station and multiple pieces of space debris around the earth. When the program first opens, one piece of debris is included. By going to the settings tab, more pieces can be included, each with their own velocity, direction, mass, and radius.

Existing tracking software that we looked at showed space debris centered on the earth. However, engineers building a particular weather satellite or astronauts working on the International Space Station are interested in the safety of their mission. The ISS View tab of our project shows our simulation from the point of view of the International Space Station.

Also, existing tracking software shows where space debris has been in the past. Users want to know if their satellite or space station will be safe in the future. In our simulation, the space debris is colored by the risk, green to red, by the likelihood of a collision. We would also like to plot risk verses time, and this will eventually be shown in our Risk tab.

Another problem with existing software is that these programs track so many pieces of debris that the view can be hard to interpret. On the bottom of the screen of our software, we have a slider bar. More or less pieces of debris are shown, based on risk, depending on how you set the slider.

Our simulation is a 2D and doesn't include data from real pieces of debris. If we had more time, we'd make a 3D simulation and we'd incorporate data of real known pieces of space debris.

Space Agency Data

The challenge says to "develop an open-source geospatial application that displays and locates every known debris object orbiting Earth in real-time." We found a number of applications that do this:

These models provide a visual representation of the amount of debris orbiting Earth. Each allows the user to see a specific piece of debris. stuffin.space allows the user to find debris based on their name and can show other debris that are from the same origin. maps.esri.com gives the user the ability to hone in on debris based on qualities such as size, launch, and orbital paths

We also found some tables of data on space debris:

https://aerospace.org/reentries

This website is a database that houses a record of all debris that has returned to Earth categorized by name, type of debris, space surveillance number, and country of origin. This was useful to see how multiple pieces of debris interact and return to Earth at different times, which spurred on the idea of using machine learning to predict where small debris are located based on collisions of larger debris.

We found examples of satellite data is used to track space debris

https://www.space-track.org/basicspacedata/query/class/tle_latest/ORDINAL/1/EPOCH/%3Enow-30/orderby/NORAD_CAT_ID/format/json

This website is the location where maps.esri.com gathers the data to pull into their simulation. On this website is a json.json file that contains the specific data used in the simulation. We used this data as a jumping-off point for what variables our 2-D model will use. In order to access the data, we needed to sign up for the website.

Some satellites capable of gathering data on space debris include radar data from the EISCAT satellite (from the European Space Agency) and visible data from the GOES satellite.

Hackathon Journey

We started with the challenge statement. "to develop an open-source geospatial application that displays and locates every known debris object orbiting Earth in real-time."

First, we looked to see what open applications existed already. We found a number of websites such as maps.esri and stuffin.space. These websites contained 3-D models displaying the names, orbit, velocities, and other data for the floating debris. However, some pieces of data that were not included that we think are important enough to be added to the software programs. Important data we thought should be included are the composition of the materials, a risk factor for how much danger they pose to people and spacecraft, and a togglable view centered on a spacecraft and the level of threats certain debris would have on it. This train of thought led us to the next part of our journey.

With some alterations thought up, more questions started cropping up. We created a list of several questions. The first is who this problem affects. The obvious is space-traversing companies, but that can span from communications to weather observation, That space debris can damage, skew, and cause altercations that can drastically affect satellites and other spacecraft we communicate with on Earth. There have been very successful missions to identify the trajectories of space debris, but very small pieces are difficult to track. We began questioning how would the tiny slivers be tracked. We came up with various ideas such as having more reflective metal coatings or paint to help visually find them, as well as using machine learning to predict locations of small debris based on collisions and data for the breaking of large and medium pieces. One final question also came up was how the debris affects the earth. With an increase in debris floating around Earth, it can begin to mess with heat from the sun. Also, since many pieces of this debris are metallic, a solar flare may have a greater toll on the magnetic field of Earth. We took these questions and started to figure out a scope for a project to present to the committee.

We then began to create the design for our project. Of the various 3-D models of space debris, two things that were not modeled that we believed were important. These were the risk level of the space debris and a non-geocentric viewpoint. So we began to create the code. By using C++ in the QT compiler, we were able to make a functional 2-D display. In the software, the user can flip between a geocentric view and a view from the International Space Station stand-in. The user can also customize the various characteristics of the debris and add/remove debris as they wish. This program took a bit of elbow grease to get working, but the end product was visually appealing and completed the desires we had set out to accomplish.

With the completion of the code, we began to prepare our presentation. We created a slideshow in Powerpoint to visually display what we had done through this project. It was a long process, but with the completion of the presentation, we could say that we had completed what we had set out to accomplish.