High-Level Project Summary
We have developed a web solution to be able to track the international space station in real-time using threeJS. Once the site loads, we can see the coordinates and the location of the station. Our solution gives users the ability to interact with models and also yto know the nearby ground stations. Our project is important because the ISS helps us to know what humans need to live in space while they carry out research to improve our quality of life on earth as well. Some of the areas in which the ISS has contributed to us are:economic development of spaceinnovative technologyhuman healthEarth observations and disaster responseglobal education.
Link to Final Project
Link to Project "Demo"
Detailed Project Description
We have developed a web interface to be able to visualize where the ISS is in real-time. The interface was intended to be user-friendly, so it limited the options with which it would have access, resulting in the only options to follow the ISS or be able to move freely and to show the nearby ground locations. It was also decided to display important information at the bottom of the interface so that when opening it on small devices it would not be blocked by the controls. To keep the interface as clean as possible we have decided to show only the GMT, the coordinates, where the station is located and the names of the nearby ground stations.
Our solution is based on ThreeJS and it works as follows. After having loaded the necessary resources, an API will be consulted to know where the ISS is located, it will return the values of latitude and longitude so that later we will convert them to XYZ coordinates to be able to move the ISS model to Where corresponds.
Our project solves the challenge of tracking the international space station in real time while adding information that may be useful to the user, such as knowing which NASA's locations are close to the ISS.
Space Agency Data
For the ISS model, we decided to use the ISS model from NASA. We decided to use this one because the size of the file was smaller than the others, but it was as good as the others.
We obtain the list of ground stations from NASA https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/11.soa_gds_2021_1.pdf
Hackathon Journey
It is one of the best experiences we have had as a team. This is the first Hackathon that we all participate in, so we had really low expectations, but after a few disagreements, we could find how to improve our work as a team in order to improve our project. I think that all of us have really enjoyed this opportunity to show what we are capable of when we put our differences aside.
References
GitHub repo: https://github.com/esc20936/UVG-ISS
ISS Model: https://nasa3d.arc.nasa.gov/detail/iss
Textures:
- Day Texture: https://www.solarsystemscope.com/textures/download/2k_earth_daymap.jpg
- Night Texture: https://acaua.gitlab.io/webgl-with-threejs/img/textures/earth/earth-night.jpg
- Clouds Texture: https://www.fraserfx.com/pages/planet-shader#earth-textures/
Video Soundtrack:
- Electricity - Ian Post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5CqZKFybUc
(we DO have a license to use this soundtrack)
Tags
#ISS #ThreeJS #real-time #tracker #Software #web #Interactive