Sprocket

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xt7AYuRSkOEOdZKXpDgnyQwse7bEq5gCub0vk-EQfd8/edit?usp=sharing

https://github.com/0c370t/spaceapps2021

Sprocket Orbital Tracker is a web application using simple and modern technologies. Our app runs almost entirely in the browser and supports both desktop and mobile. To visualize space objects, the app obtains TLE data from CelesTrak, interprets the data through a C++ library compiled into WebAssembly, and displays the positions of hundreds of thousands of satellites and debris in real time using NASA’s WorldWind library. A simple user interface built with SvelteKit allows users to browse and interact with the data.

This project was created using SvelteKit, TailwindCSS, NASA WorldWind, and WebAssembly; Vercel was also used to deploy and host the product.

With our simple and easy to use interface, you can control multiple parameters. It is possible to view different datasets containing different satellites and debris, skip to a date and time, speed up or slow down time, pause and play the animations, and change between 2D and 3D projection. You can also click on a satellite in the projection to view the orbit and obtain metadata such as the name and type of the satellite, latitude, longitude, altitude, and more. With more time, other features such as calculating orbits based on the rotation of Earth, visualizing close encounters and potential collisions of debris, predicting future debris/object amount based on current rate, and viewing the sky from a location on the surface of the Earth would be implemented.

Our project uses NASA’s WorldWind to virtualize the positions of tens of thousands of satellites and debris in space in real time, as well as providing the option to go forward and backward in time, displaying anticipated orbit, and other general information. The TLEs we include with the application are sourced from CelesTrak, which to the best of our knowledge, is a NASA data source (https://api.nasa.gov/#tle).

We selected this challenge because it provided a novel technical challenge, rather than a mad dash to build a more generic CRUD application in a weekend.

We knew JavaScript would not be able to handle the computational demands of propagating hundreds of thousands of orbits simultaneously. We chose to use emscripten to compile a C based library into webassembly so we could off-load the computations to a faster solution.

A remaining issue is that our calculations are based on geographic longitude and latitude and the earth does not rotate with the time. This makes orbits not appear as elliptical orbits. We implemented different projections that make this look good.

The Team

Brian Donald

Bryan Pikaard

Zach Stence

Andreas Wenzel

SvelteKit

• Component Framework

TailwindCSS

• CSS Framework to speed development

NASA WorldWind

• Data Visualization

WASM

• C/C++
• libastro
• emscripten

Vercel

• Project hosting

CelesTrak

• TLE Data Source

#worldwind #celestrak #programming #webapplication #webassembly #javascript #c++ #c #space #debris #visualization #kessler #nasa #iss #satellite #tle #earth #svelte #sveltekit

This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.