Awards & Nominations
Brute Force has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Local Impact
The solution that demonstrates the greatest potential for local impact.
Moonquake Map for Planetary Scientists
High-Level Project Summary
From the Mesopotamians that would observe the sky, to today's telescopes that look at the furthest edges of our universe, humans have always been curious to explore the unknown.Seismic information can reveal critical clues to the lore of the universe. Our project aims to do just that. By paying attention to the internal pulses of our closest celestial body (the moon) we aim to understand its internal structure.We analyzed data provided by Apollo PSE seismometers and plotted seismic events. For visualization, we created a model of the moon, on which we mapped PSE stations with their data as plots when interacted with, as well as shallow moonquakes as ripples according to their magnitude.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
View demo website (hosted on GitHub): https://constantinosar.github.io/Moonquake-Map/
The map has two main tabs to select options to display data, the "Timeline" tab to view data from stations in the Apollo Passive Seismic Experiments (PSE) Network and the "Nakamura" tab to visualize shallow moonquake locations and magnitude.
Using the "Timeline" tab, the user is able to select a date by selecting the year, month, and day of the date. Then, by clicking "Show Data", if during that day any of the 5 stations in the Apollo PSE network (S11, S12, S14, S15, S16) transmitted data from its seismometers back to Earth, its location will be highlighted on the map. By clicking on a station, a plot of processed time-series data from the SEED Collection [2] will appear. Each plot includes a graph for each of the mid-period seismometers (MH1, MH2, MHZ). Additionally, the max deviations from average daily values recorded on the plots are included with on each graph's title, which are useful to note disturbances in the graphs, indicating a possible moonquake.
Using the "Nakamura" tab, the user is able to click on dates from a list of dates where shallow moonquakes were detected in Nakamura et al. 1979 [1]. Clicking on a date highlights the corresponding moonquake with a ripple effect relative to the magnitude of the moonquake. Multiple moonquakes can be selected and displayed on the map. Clicking on "Clear Data" removes any mapped moonquakes from the map.
The Apollo PSE data used was scraped from NASA's PDS with pse_fetch.py and plotted with pse_plot.py using Python. ObsPy was used for data processing and plotting. Station info and locations (longitude, latitude) were retrieved from the FDSN [4]. The Nakamura 1979 data was fetched and converted for usage with nakamura_convert.py using Python.
Space Agency Data
Apollo PSE station info and locations from the FDSN [4] was used to map the stations. The data from these stations [3] was scraped from NASA's PDS and processed to display mid-period seismometer data graphs. In order to detect disturbances, max deviations are also plotted.
Nakamura 1979 data [1] was used to display the locations of shallow moonquakes and display a ripple effect according to their magnitude in the data.
Apollo landing locations from Globe.GL [3] were used to plot the landings to have a reference of their locations when viewing stations.
Hackathon Journey
The Space Apps experience has been a lot of fun, as trying to develop something in a short period of time is a great challenge.
Our team chose the moonquake map challenge since we like visualization and planet exploration. Throughout the challenge we learned a lot about space exploration, why scientists deploy seismographs in other celestial bodies and how they determine the internal structure of other celestial bodies.
Initially we started by creating a virtual 3D model of the moon and then gather data for visualization. Then we moved on to refine the user interface of the website and plot data on the model.
We would like to thank the Cyprus Space Exploration Organization for their support during the hackathon, and their willingness to work with our team to develop and potentially release our project in the future.
References
[1] Apollo Passive Seismic Experiment Expanded Event Catalog Online from NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS):
https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/apollo/seismic_event_catalog.htm
[2] Apollo Passive Seismic Experiment SEED Collection from NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS):
https://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/lunar/urn-nasa-pds-apollo_pse/
[3] Globe.Gl for Moon Map and Apollo landing locations:
https://github.com/vasturiano/globe.gl
[4] Apollo Passive Seismic Experiments Station Info and Locations from the FDSN:
https://www.fdsn.org/networks/detail/XA_1969/
Tags
#moon, #moonquake, #map, #PSE, #Apollo, #NASA, #data, #model, #plots, #Nakamura, #PDS