High-Level Project Summary
The amount of space missions has left a significant amount of debris in orbit around Earth, which has been increasing with time. This poses a problem as not only future missions are at risk of colliding but also satellites that enable important aspects of modern daily life. Stellar-Bytes is a geospatial tool that tracks debris objects orbiting Earth in real-time, which will help researchers and the public to identify debris around Earth.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
Stellar-Bytes is a user-friendly visualization tool that uses data from space-track.org to track debris in real time. The globe is rendered from NASA WorldWide Web in order to make visualizations interactive. We hope that with this tool people interested might find a way to explore debris around Earth, as well to provide a fast way to access the information about satellites in a different manner, since our app displays latitud, altitude and elevation of the debris. The search bar allows searches by NORAD ID and Name and displays a table with the information.
Tools used in this project:
- Python: Used for extracting the data and calculate the position of each debris with the library Skyfield.
- Photoshop: Used for designing the logo and buttons on the web app.
- Javascript: Used for the WorldWind interface and the interactive functions.
- HTML: Used for the internal structure for the web page.
- CSS: Used for styling.
- Azure: Used to upload the final project online.
Space Agency Data
Hackathon Journey
We chose to track the space debris as we consider that is an important topic. Mapping space debris was a subject that none of us was familiar with, however, it's a project where each of us could contribute with our individual abilities: analytic skills, programming skills, and different knowledge, since we come from different backgrounds.
We liked the idea to do something that could contribute to researchers and space enthusiasts alike. We love the idea that this app could be helpful to the advance of science and we recognize the right each one of us has to be curious: you don't have to be a scientist to be interested in space debris and satellites.
Our combined abilities allowed us to have a good team flow and to divide the task in a very efficient manner. It also helped us in solving the problems that we had as the things one of us didn't know, someone else did. What we didn't know we solved it by being curious and tenacious, not giving up on finding answers, and trying different paths until we got on the right track.
Overall we had a very positive experience. Learning is something we really enjoy and even more if it involves fun and engaging challenges that can be solved with a good team. We had lots of fun!
We would like to thank our local ambassadors of Hackademy Culiacán for organizing the local event where we had the opportunity to also learn more about coding and space, and for giving us credits so that we could use the Azure platform.
References
Tags
#spacedebris #debris #spacetrack #mapping #map
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.