High-Level Project Summary
Our main goal with this project was to reach as many different people as possible, making information related to the ISS available and user-friendly. The web app we developed resolves the proposed challenge by offering a real time 3D representation of the International Space Station, but not only that! We have also developed all kind of interactive ways to offer information about the history and characteristics of the ISS: 3D models, photographs, videos, users can even check the Astronomy Picture of the Day provided by NASA featured in the main page.Another very important feature is the ability to look for sighing opportunities near the users, bringing the ISS a bit closer to people.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Our project is basically a server hosted web application divided in two main pages:
The main page offers a ton of interactive information about the ISS and it's journeys, The first thing the users see when they access the page is the Astronomy Picture of the Day, letting them enjoy one of the many things the ISS do for us, and making sure visiting it never gets boring to visit our page. In other sections of the main page, people can see stunning photographs of the ISS, learn about it's history, meet the crew, understand the origin of the project, and play around with a detailed 3D model of the ship.
The other page, or as we like to call it, "the globe" lets users look at a simulation with a real time 3D representation of the ISS current location. On top of that, people can click anywhere in the globe to get detailed information of the next sighting opportunity, such as date and time, maximum height trajectory, visibility...
All this was made using HTML, CSS, and javascript. We used the WorldWind tool provided by NASA to make the 3D simulation, and all the data from APIs where treated in JSON or XML format.
Space Agency Data
We used a wide variety of data and resources in this project for a lot of different purposed.
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Days API (APOD): For showing picture of the day as the background of our main page.
NASA TLE API: For retrieving the current location of the ISS.
NASA Spot the Station API: Used for exploring the next sighting opportunity of the ISS.
restcountries and bigdatacloud APIs: To make relations between coordinates, countries and capitals.
We also looked through tons of documents about the ISS provided by NASA and ISS National Lab in order to gather the information that we later condensed and provided in our information section.
Hackathon Journey
We came to this hackaton without even having an idea of what we wanted to do. We decided to settle on the idea of the ISS tracking challenge, and wanted to give it a divulgation and information approach. We knew a web app was the option that fitted the best with the idea we had in mind, but none of us had any prior experience with any web technologies, other than some small experiments with javascript, and so, this las 24 hours have been a very bug learning experience.
This has been a great opportunity to learn not only about new technologies, but also about the International Space Station and all that relates to it.
References
Here are some of the main resources used for this project:
-WorldWind examples and documentation.
-All the APIs mentioned in the Agency Data section.
-Snippets of code provided by W3C School.
-Model Viewer library and documentation for 3d model visualization
Tags
#divulgation,#space,#iss,#software,#3D,#maps