High-Level Project Summary
There are many obstacles we face while studying celestial bodies such as asteroids. For instance, Jupiter has a group of asteroids in its orbit called Trojans that are exceedingly small and difficult to be detected as they appear as unresolved points of light. We have to rely on their variation in brightness over time which gives us intuition about how they look like and how they rotate. We are developing a tool that can illustrate how the light curve of the object is highly affected by its shape. This can be done by developing an algorithm that calculates the reflected light on the object by series of frames representing the rotation of the object.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
We are witnessing the space exploration era; however, it has never been that easy.
There are many obstacles we face while studying celestial bodies such as asteroids. For instance, Jupiter has a group of asteroids in its orbit called Trojans that are exceedingly small and difficult to be detected as they appear as unresolved points of light. Typically, the solution would be sending highly equipped probes to gather information which is not efficient. As a result, we have to rely on their variation in brightness over time which gives us intuition about how they look like and how they rotate.
We are developing a tool that can illustrate how the light curve of the object is highly affected by its shape. This can be done by developing an algorithm that calculates the reflected light on the object by series of frames representing the rotation of the object. To Take the tool to the next level we can implement this algorithm to run in the background of a GUI which allows the user to import his own asteroid-like objects and study their light curves virtually and see how they are influenced by the shape and the manner of rotating. The Algorithm is simple, creating an asteroid-like 3d object, exposing it to a static light source, rotating the object in loop mode, rendering the scene, splitting this video into frames, converting the frames to colormap (Viridis), summing the pixels up and we got the data, feeding these data to a python-specific library (LightKurve) and we get the light curve.
By replicating the same process many times, we can create a database that can work in both ways. First, we can create light curves for any shape with an orbit around light. The second would be taking data from telescopes such as Hubble and input it into our algorithm to predict and study the Trojans’ shapes and properties.
The solution is purely software as we used Blender to create the objects and scenes required to get the data to plot the light curve. Also, we have used Python as our main programming language to build the GUI and implement the algorithm.
Space Agency Data
In order to produce a solution, we had to deepen our understanding of the problem, its factors and the previous solutions. At the beginning of the challenge, we did not know much about the light curve and what possible outcomes we can generate from that concept which shall serve as the solution to our problem.
Throughout our solution for the challenge, we have used some relevant resources to get more educated about the term of light curve and how we can obtain one like:
“A Practical Guide to Light curve Photometry and Analysis” by Brian D. Warner and NASA websites. and "When Light Curves Throw Us Curve Balls - Resources - Space Apps Challenge | 2021"
Also, we needed real official 3d models to verify in our application so we used Nasa's Asteroid Shape Models "Asteroid Shape Models (nasa.gov)"
Hackathon Journey
In NASA space apps, we believe that it teaches us to perceive the world differently and force a change in many different ways. At first, the presented challenges are not typical problems and some would look unimportant, however, we learned that answering such questions is as important as large ones and truly capable of changing the world .
Our interest in studying asteroids appeared due to their significant importance in understanding the Earth’s biosphere in the past. Also, asteroids can offer a rich supply of various minerals, which can be exploited for the exploration and colonization of our solar system in the upcoming decades. Furthermore, asteroids are believed to be the building blocks of planets and the source that delivered the elements of life to earth. So, studying asteroids is essential to understand the true identity of earth and the other planets in the solar system.
In this challenge, the collaborative work has shown its value as we have distributed the tasks among us between paperwork, researching, coding, video editing, voice-over, and others. So, it would be easy for us to maintaining our workflow during the hackathon (collaborative). As, the philosophy of Linux states” Do one thing and do it right”, which is quite relevant, everyone in the team will take one part and excel it that would be our strategy to finish the solution and ace the rounds.
In the end, we would like to thank the volunteers of NASA space apps Cairo who helped us to be part of this journey.
References
We have used some relevant resources to understand the light curve concept:
We used Blender software for modeling:
blender.org - Home of the Blender project - Free and Open 3D Creation Software
We obtained official data from:
Models | 3D Resources (nasa.gov)
Asteroid Shape Models (nasa.gov)
Textbooks:
Tags
#python, #data, #asteriod, #simulation, #Asteriods, #3D,#lightcurve,#electronjs