High-Level Project Summary
We developed a web page where the track of the Space Station can be visualized in real time in space, from the perspective of the Earth orbiting around it. It's important to have a point of reference since the space is so big and deep so we wanted to add it because in this way users can see and understand better how Space Station travels through space.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
For the tracking visualization we used React to make the web page and to generate the 3D models in it we used the library THREE from React to load the models and multiple textures so we could have a better representation of what's happening.
For the server we used Python with the libraries Debris to have the properties of a debris and Flask to make the different functions faster and shorter compared to other ways. These functions obtain the information from pages that track the Space Station getting the coordinates with other characteristics and this information is send to the page where the Space Station model gets updated for each group of coordinates around the Earth. With the THREE libraries from React, is possible to rotate the Earth model and look where the Space Station is located.
Space Agency Data
We used the TLE4 data to get the positions of the ISS, and the propagate the trayectory of it to represnted in the simulation
Hackathon Journey
We wanted to do this project because we thought that it would be interesting to see in real time how the Space Station moves through the space and especially how it looks from outside relative from Earth. It was hard to find a way to render 3D models inside the web page and make the ISS model to move each coordinate data that was sent from the server. But we beat this by searching and trying different approaches with different libraries in React.
References
http://celestrak.org/
https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/tracking_map.cfm
https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/
Link of the hosted web app:
http://3.14.70.57/