High-Level Project Summary
We developed an ISS web-tracker in the form of a web app, so it's accessible to everyone through a web browser, regardless of whether they are knowledgeable in astronomy or not.Our tools solves the challenge by providing a tool to keep track of the ISS in 3D, being that the objective stated for the project.We are well aware it's not the most pretty or complete among the many of them done by other teams. But it serves as a base from which to expand with open-source development, allowing both people that may use the tool, and anyone interested in following the project (including ourselves), to learn new things about the universe that surrounds us, both literally and metaphorically.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
Starting from 2D data (latitude and longitude) provided to us by an API, and assuming the altitude of the ISS to be around 400 km (resulted from research, disregarding small variations), we can plot the earth and a model of the ISS in a 3D cartesian space.
Project source code: https://github.com/fakenlol/iss_tracker
Space Agency Data
We got the earth textures from https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/, which provides free of use with attribution (CC BY 4.0) an assortment of different textures from across the solar system, based in NASA elevation and imagery data.
Also, our tool retrieves the information necessary to determine the ISS coordinates from http://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/gp.php?CATNR=25544, being Celestrak a non profit organization. Given their information updates every few hours, it's allows us to provide an accurate and updated location for the ISS.
Finally, we are using a high res ISS model provided by NASA: https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/iss-hi-res
Hackathon Journey
With this being our first time participating in a hackathon, we think the experience gained from this journey has been great.. We accomplished our goals, improvising and searching new solutions, leading to expanding our knowledge. It was a fun and interesting process, and we will be looking forward to participating in more challenges if the opportunity arises.
We were well aware from the beginning that we wouldn't be able to win, but despite this we decided to take it as a chance to further develop our skills, and learn a bit more about astronomy.
We took new knowledge on developing a web app, how to manage an API, research information in trusted sources, and took a bite in some of the details that go into making sense of the data provided by the ISS. For example, why is the data represented as a two-line element set, how should we approach decoding it in useful information and what it represents.
We also learned about the modules that comprise the ISS, why are there many TLE data we could choose, the speed and scale we should expect from the ISS relative to earth, manage geometry in space, and much more.
Have to admit it, we were first trying to model the ISS in Blender, but then saw there was already one done for us to use. Sometimes to develop something new, we have to take look into what's already done.
References
Earth textures: we used the "earth day map", the "earth normal map", the "earth clouds", the "earth specular map", and the "stars + milky way"
ISS latitude and longitude location: http://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/gp.php?CATNR=25544
To transform the TLE data to latitude and longitude: https://github.com/davidcalhoun/tle.js/
For making the globe: https://threejs.org/
For visual styles and the web interface of our project: Bootstrap, JQuery, React, and Next.js
The ISS High Res model:https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/iss-hi-res
Tags
#software