Awards & Nominations
Cambridge Asteroids has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Best Use of Data
The solution that best makes space data accessible, or leverages it to a unique application.
Voxteroid: Generating asteroid light curves using Threejs and Blender
High-Level Project Summary
We have developed a web interface for generating the light-curves of various three-dimensional shapes including existing asteroids, comets and other objects using Threejs and Blender. After choosing the rotation axis, angle of the sun and speed of rotation of the asteroid, the user can then generate its corresponding light curve sending a request to a headless Blender instance. Our project provides users an accessible interface to find light curves for a various number of objects, and allows them to upload their own. This is important as it can be used to better understand the asteroids that will be observed when the Lucy spacecraft arrives at the Trojan asteroids in years to come.
Link to Project "Demo"
Link to Final Project
Detailed Project Description
We developed a web interface for generating the light-curves of various three-dimensional shapes including existing asteroids, comets and other objects. The interface allows users to select different asteroids, choosing their rotation axis, angle of the sun and speed of rotation, which is rendered in real time in the browser using Threejs. The user can then generate the corresponding light curve of the asteroid, which is found by sending the setup to a headless Blender instance running in a Docker container. Blender is then used to rotate the object over one rotational phase and output the light curve and corresponding video.
This curve is calculated in Blender, but the frontend is rendered in Three.js. This gives the tool the immediate visual feedback of a 3D scene, and also allows the generated light curve to be high quality, including raytracing and material reflectivity. The tool is connected over an AJAX interface.
Our project solves the challenge by providing users an accessible interface for finding the light curves of a various number of objects, as well as uploading their own. By changing the object shape, the user can see how the corresponding light curves differ, which provides insight into what type of objects we can expect to see given measurement of their light curves. Our project is important as it can be used to better understand what type of asteroids will be observed when the Lucy spacecraft arrives at the Trojan asteroids in years to come, which will allow NASA to plan better what to do with the precious amount of time the spacecraft has there.
Space Agency Data
We made extensive use of the NASA 3D resources library (https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/), which provided 3D models for many of the examples we used when modelling the asteroids. These allowed us to develop accurate light curves based on physical observations, making our project relevant to real-world scientists.
We also used a 3D model of the comet 67P/C-G, provided by ESA (https://sci.esa.int/web/rosetta/-/54728-shape-model-of-comet-67p), taken from data from the Rosetta satellite.
Hackathon Journey
We had an amazing time completing the SpaceApps challenge this year. All of us approached the problem with no experience with 3D modelling at all, and we all discovered the joy in it while coding up something for a very important project! While we all worked on different parts, it was really satisfying reaching the end when we finally got our platform to produce fantastic results. We have learned a lot both about 3D modelling but also about working in a team and producing high quality code in a short length of time!
We would like to thank Shannon Brunette for providing the painting of the stars that provide the backdrop to our interface, as well as being patient with the three of us taking up so much space over the weekend!
References
Our project GitHub: https://github.com/Laurence-Cullen/Asteroids
Software:
- Blender (https://www.blender.org/)
- Threejs (https://threejs.org/)
3D model files:
Tags
#asteroids #threejs #blender #3D #lucy #rendering #raytracing
Global Judging
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.