High-Level Project Summary
The project visulizes the ISS in 3D and offers tools for educational and recreational purposes.The project's primary goal is to make learning about orbit and space more accessible for amateur astronomers, teachers looking to make learning more fun, and curious kids.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
The project adds the ISS on top of the NASA Earth model and displays its location in real-time with a day/night cycle alongside a live feed from the ISS.
The 3D model includes the Earth, the ISS, the ISS' movement trail, and any other spacecraft uploaded through the backend. The App can show the past and future positions of the ISS based on the data provided as well as a display of a t-minus timer until the ISS passes over based on the input provided. Also, the App is able to detect and alert of potential collisions based on the provided satellite trajectory.
You can pan the earth using the mouse, or a camera with hand gestures and movement utilizing computer vision.
The App utilzes Python for the backend, data management, and computer vision. The App also uses JavaScript for the frontend. We used Blender to render the 3D model.
The App sets to make education more accessible by providing a web tool that is simple, interactive, and can be built further upon by providing a higher quality data. This project can be used as a an open source to develop further applications like games, displays of other orbital objects.
Space Agency Data
Hackathon Journey
Currently, the tools available to explore orbital objects aren't accessible and user friendly. We see this as a problem since people who want to educate themselves on this topic are met with outdated sites, which, while do provide relevant and accurate data, don't encourage the user to further explore this topic. Therefore, we made this our guiding objective, to make a web tool that is both accurate and interactive.
The target demograhic that we identified are educators, amateur astronomers, government and private companies, and primarily children.
We would like to thank the mentors and judges for providing us with guidance, real-world case studies, and an outside view on the project.
We had fun developing this Space App, overcoming these challenges and to see our project grow into what we envisioned it to be.
References
Tags
#software, #iss, #web_development, #javascript, #python, #flask, #computer_vision, #3d, #interactive