Aberration

https://github.com/rlphrazz/aberration

https://youtu.be/3G_bHDQWuBQ

Aberration.dev is a constantly updated website that allows users to get an interactive three-dimensional visualization of the moon to analyze seismic activity. It comes with a multitude of features in which different settings can be altered to heighten the user experience.

Features:

• The first and most important feature allows the user to toggle four different data options, shallow quakes, deep quakes, meteorite collisions, and the modules that were sent to the moon to send us seismic data. The shallow quakes will also have varying sizes on the surface proportional to their magnitude which allows for a simple acquisition of the data.

• Next comes the moon options feature which comes with two different options.

• Rotation speed is one of the variables that can be changed according to the user using a slider, and the other option is the stop rotation feature.

• The lighting setting comes with four different features starting with sunlight intensity, this allows the user to choose how bright or dim they wish the light coming from the sun to be.

• The next feature installed is the position of the sunlight hitting the moon, this provides a full 360° variation in positioning which the user can change with a slider. Next comes the brightness of the website itself, called the universal intensity.

• The last feature provides the user with the option to disable realistic lighting and have a 360° studio-type lighting set up, this allows for the user to see the entirety of the moon at once without any shadows.

• The last features of the current version are the camera settings in which the field of view can be changed at will. The final features are the reset camera and reset position which as their names state, resets the FOV and position of the camera back to the starting setting.

In future updates, we hope to apply the same concept to earthquakes and, soon enough, marsquakes when the data becomes available. In addition, we will try to use the idea in other scientific fields with the goal of simplifying data reading while keeping the same accuracy, if not better.

In order to create our website, each team member was working on their own laptop or PC. We used a JavaScript library called Three.js that helps in creating and manipulating 3D objects and scenes for a website alongside HTML and CSS. GitHub and Vercel were used to make our website available on the internet for anyone to access it. We also used .csv files and .json files to save data and read it in our code. In addition, we used DaVinci Resolve, 3DS Max, Substance Painter, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects to create our videos and some 3D objects that we used.

We used the maps provided by NASA for the lunar surface. (https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/details.cgi?aid=4720)

In addition, we used NASA’s resources recommended for our challenge in order to implement our code with the locations of moonquakes and seismometers installed by the Apollo missions. (https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/lunar/urn-nasa-pds-apollo_seismic_event_catalog/data/)

Our data included:

1. The latitude, longitude, and magnitude of 3 types of moonquakes: shallow, deep, and meteorite induced ones.
2. The latitude and longitude of the modules on the surface of the moon along with their names. For future endeavors, we are hoping to include the time parameter.

Our NASA Space Apps experience began when we saw the call for applicants for the challenge towards the end of summer 2022. At first, we weren’t really sure if we actually wanted to participate, even though it was under the NASA banner. The main driving factor behind our participation eventually was the push that came from our physics professor back at NDU, Dr. Bassem Sabra, who encouraged us to make a team and engage in the challenge that was awaiting us. We took this decision to participate one week before the beginning of the hackathon at USEK.

Back then, we had to choose one challenge out of the 23 available, one of them being to create our own challenge. Our main criteria when choosing the challenge were mainly three: originality, interest, and feasibility. After thorough research, we narrowed down our choices to three challenges: “Make A Moonquake Map!”, “Save The Earth From Another Carrington Event!” and “Create Your Own Challenge”.

We ditched the third challenge as it wouldn’t allow us to be nominated for global awards. As for the Carrington event, we didn’t have enough time to acquire the necessary skills to work on machine learning algorithms, which eventually prompted us to choose the remaining challenge: “Make A Moonquake Map!”. It did prove to be a good choice mainly due to the fact that our team already had some experience with 3D data visualization.

Even though we knew how to tackle the challenge, there were still new things to learn along the way. We mainly used the Three.js library in JavaScript, which was the main programming language behind the design of the interactive globe and website. A lot of documentation was read and many YouTube videos were watched in order to better understand how the library works and how to implement it. We also had to learn more about what moonquakes are, how do they happen, and most of all how do they differ. The work was divided between designing the web app, researching, analyzing the data, preparing animations, and social media management.

When the coding part of our web app was done, it was time to make it an actual website so anyone could access it. We thought the process was quite easy and straight forward, but unfortunately, we ran into a small problem that took a lot of time and energy from us to fix it and ended up being very simple.

Thankfully, we were able to finish what was required before the end of the hackathon and also had some extra time to work on extra features to make the website more interactive and appealing to users.

The final process was to get all required documents ready to submit on the website before the deadline.

We are eventually looking forward to implementing this project in future endeavors, like the visualization of marsquakes, for example, or even other bodies in our solar system, which could not only help us understand more about our close neighbors but also about our own planet and how it was formed.

NASA Seismic Data:

https://pds.nasa.gov/ds-view/pds/viewBundle.jsp?identifier=urn%3Anasa%3Apds%3Aapollo_seismic_event_catalog&version=1.0

https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/apollo/seismic_event_catalog.htm

Three.js:

https://threejs.org/docs/index.html#manual/en/introduction/Creating-a-scene

Articles:

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/goddard/2019/moonquakes

https://moon.nasa.gov/resources/13/apollo-11-seismic-experiment/

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2006/15mar_moonquakeshttps://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/HamishALSEP.html

#moon, #lunar, #seismology, #seismic, #moonquake, #Apollo, #NASA, #threejs, #3d