Gargantua

Colombo | Track the Space Station in 3D

Awards & Nominations

Gargantua has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

ISS Tracker 3D

High-Level Project Summary

We have built a web-based tool to allow users to track the real-time location of the International Space Station in 3D. Users can interact with the scene and get important features such as overhead predictions of the ISS. The tool we made is an open-source tool and it is listed on our GitHub page. By making it open-source, anyone can learn how these types of tools are made, and would inspire them to build their own 3D visualizations. With the high demand for 3D technology, this visualization can be considered a contemporary solution for this challenge.

Link to Final Project

https://isstracker3d.co/

Link to Project "Demo"

https://youtu.be/PvyRvqV190U

Detailed Project Description

GitHub Page:- https://github.com/MalithaBandara/ISSTracker3D

Our solution for the challenge "Track the space station in 3D" is a web-based tool that can track and provide a 3D Visualization of the real-time location of the International space station.

Our tool mainly offers the following features.

Real-Time tracking of the ISS
Future over-head predictions
3D visualization of data
Visualization of information regarding the ISS such as its history, modules, and astronauts.

We also hope to add much more features like "email alerts" for overhead projections, Space debris collision alerts and also recreate this for the android OS in the near future.

This tool would help people to use 3D technology for visualizing astronomical data without installing specific software or an app.

This tool is built using the software Visual Studio Code with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. A few different JS libraries came in handy for this project.

Satellite.js
TLE.js
Node.js
Browserify

We also built some informative visualizations for data regarding the ISS. It includes,

Timeline of the history of ISS
Detailed information regarding the different modules of the ISS
Information about the astronomers on board the ISS

We hope that this solution would be a great tool for any space enthusiast to gather knowledge about the Internation Space Station in an engaging way!!!

Space Agency Data

NASA WorldWind

This javascript library served as the base for our tracker. With this library, we could visualize 3D data related to the Earth easily and efficiently.

Nasa 3D Model Library

3D model of the ISS was used from this library.

Nasa space birds

This app was a great inspiration for our work.

Live space station tracking map by ESA

This 2D space station tracking map was a huge inspiration for our project.

Information about the history, modules, and astronomers on ISS

We use data from sites like NASA, ESA, JAXA, etc.

Other than many more references, and inspirations were taken from NASA and other space agency websites.

Hackathon Journey

The experience was amazing. We had some tough spots when doing it, but that's what made it very interesting. We learned to share the work with each other. Love for doing astronomy and the thirst for having challenges is what inspired my team. Our approach to developing this project was mainly coding, observation knowledge, and creative ideas. My team constantly shared their ideas and positively did their part to resolve setbacks successfully. Our team would like to thank the organizers of this challenge(NASA), Local leed who helped us in this project and everyone else who was a part of this because this was a great chance to go beyond what we thought we could do.

References

Nasa WorldWind (3D Visualization)

Satellite.js (JS library)

Tle.js (JS library)

NASA (Information)

ESA (Information)

celstrack.org (TLE data)

sketchfab.com (3D Models)

codepen.io (HTML,CSS,JS codes)

freepik.com (Vector images)

geoapify.com (Geocoding tool)

g7vrd.co.uk (Overhead Prediction)

node.js (JS library)

Browserify (Js library)

Wikipedia.org (Information)

countryflagsapi.com (Flags)