TEAM AQUILA

Colombo | When Light Curves Throw Us Curve Balls

Variant asteroid shapes- How it changes

High-Level Project Summary

We focused on developing a way to let the users to explore and get an idea about how the shapes of asteroids affect their light curves. So, we developed a website that consists of asteroids with different shapes created by us and then published with the light curves those asteroids make as they rotate around its axis. Users can observe, how the shapes of the asteroids affected the visible light from Earth.

Link to Project "Demo"

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VNpstzwqsVa7qDsmtJ_zHDKlTPNh6Jn0/view?usp=sharing

Link to Final Project

https://sites.google.com/view/team-aquila/

Detailed Project Description

We can see the light curves of any object in space unless it's a perfect globe travelling through space. The reason for this phenomena is that the light reflected from the object is not constant as the surface of the object has rough-smooth, high-low points and then the light reflects from it varies with time. Because of their rotation around themselves, these changes in visible light repeats over and over again.


The challenge we chose was to develop a tool that the users can explore the shape of an asteroid affects the appearance of the light curve of it. We started our work by studying the resources referred with the challenge and we created some asteroids on our own and animated them to rotate around themselves. We used 'Light  Measurement tool for Occultation observation used  Video Ecorder' also known as 'limovie' to generate the exact light curve graphs of the asteroids. After that, we animated those graphs to give the users a better understandable content.


Users will be able to explore how the shape of an asteroid affects its light curve with these animated graphs and asteroids..

Space Agency Data

NASA and other space agencies were our main data resource throughout our entire hackathon.


Some resources we used to get data-


  • https://lco.global/education/activities/plotting-an-asteroid-light-curve/
  • https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-6256/150/3/75

Hackathon Journey

As Team Aquila, This is our first time being part of the NASA Spaceapps Challenge. Our team is having a wonderful experience for

throughout given 48 hours by solving the selected challenges.


We just learned a lot of things here including virtual hacking, creating 3D models and etc. When we just go through challenges 'WHEN LIGHT CURVES THROW US CURVE BALLS we decided to follow this challenge as it is mainly based on asteroids and light curves. We made six asteroids with different shapes and displayed how the provided graphs change according to their shapes.



References

Data & resources we used:

  • www.nasa.gov/kepler/education/lightcurves
  • nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/golevka
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcTTn9g_0SY&list=PL37Yhb2zout05pUjr7OoRFpTNroq_wd9f&index=5
  • https://www.nasa.gov/content/asteroid-grand-challenge/characterize/light-curve-analysis


Tools & softwares:

  • Blender
  • Wondershare Filmora
  • Google sites
  •  Light  Measurement tool for  Occultation observation used  VIdeo  Ecorder

Tags

#asteroids , #light_curves, #brigtness, #asteroid_shapes

Global Judging

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

When Light Curves Throw Us Curve Balls

From Earth, the Trojan asteroids appear to be single points of light; their light curves—the way their observed brightness varies with time—are one of the few clues available to scientists working to determine the shapes of these distant bodies. Your challenge is to design a tool that allows users to explore how the shape of an asteroid affects the appearance of its light curve.