3.14Heads| Can You Hear Me Now?
Awards & Nominations
3.14Heads has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Can You Hear Me Now?
LinkedUp
Summary
As humans take to the stars, we will face many novel challenges. For example, many factors affect how effectively you can communicate with astronauts as they travel far from Earth. Some of these challenges include distance, signal interference, and orbital dynamics. This tool will provide an educational sandbox environment to simulate/explore how communication would look like with people on Mars. We do this by gamifying and simplifying the process of creating a link budget, which represents an amalgamation of various signal strength factors. In providing such an interface, we hope to galvanize a wide audience, providing an interface for everyone to learn and explore.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We developed a link budget sandbox web tool that allows the public to simulate the effects of different parameters on communications between Earth and Mars. The aim of the tool is to demystify radio communications for younger students, to educate them about the considerations involved, and to show them that anyone can contribute to solving problems in the space sector, no matter how intimidating they may be at first glance. This is very important, since the space sector will need all the help it can get from the public, students, developers, and experts alike, in order to go beyond where any human has gone before.
To accomplish this, our tool - affectionately called LinkedUp - provides the user with a clean interface with which to tune various parameters related to the communications link between Earth and Mars. Once they are ready to “send their message”, the web tool will evaluate the link margin for the hypothetical link, based on the user-inputted parameters, as well as live weather data, CSA Mars atmosphere data, etc. Based on this, the user can see whether the link they designed works - as well as other information, such as the time it would take to communicate a message. Along the way, LinkedUp offers a help page and a slew of helpful tooltips, to educate the user on the physical meanings of the various parameters they are tuning. With this educational simulation experience, we hope to catch people's attention to some of the challenges involved in space travel, and ingrain in the back of their minds that this is not only possible, but it is the future.
How We Developed This Project
Our team was inspired to pursue this challenge as a means of making space-related problems more accessible to the general public, and especially to students considering future work in the space sector. Our team consists of space enthusiasts and aspiring space engineers - as such, we have experienced both the allure and the difficulty of working on space-related projects. However, we don’t want younger students and non-experts to be discouraged by the latter, so we were motivated to make a tool that shows people that even the most difficult problems are within reach of being solved.
To develop this project, we used git version control and split our team in two:
Frontend
One half focused on creating a smooth front-end user experience using React.js. Some libraries used were React-Bootstrap and Material-UI. Our primary objective was to create a sleek, attractive, and simple interface that would not intimidate. We also ensured that we provided an option to delve into the more complex parameters for the more physics-savvy crowd, and created tooltip definitions for the less savvy.
Backend
The other half of our team handled the back-end logistics and the link budget calculations using Node.js/Express.js and Python, respectively. We used Node’s built in child processes to communicate between our Python scripts and our server, and leveraged Express to easily handle requests from the frontend. Using Python, we meticulously created a framework for performing link budget calculations, leveraging NASA and CSA resources as well as prior experience from designing data transmitters for an amateur CubeSat.
Difficulties
One major difficulty we had was integrating these two halves - although using some software backflipping, we were able to overcome this challenge and produce a working final product that we are proud of. Another difficulty we encountered was in communicating with Python scripts through Node.js. Our solution to this issue was to avoid communicating directly, and instead writing inputs and outputs to text files in the back-end. In general, our workflow ended up running smoothly and we enjoyed working together as a team.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
In our link budget calculations, we made extensive use of NASA handbooks for calculating and estimating values such as gas attenuation and rain fade. We also used CSA data on the atmospheric pressure of Mars to help us gauge the gas attenuation travelling to and from a Mars ground station.
Outside of space agency data, we also used real-time weather data to estimate certain Earth-related losses, as well as data from the US Navy on the distance between the Earth and Mars to estimate free-space path loss.
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QXafB0cHf0fmRT_meOuYYZPRjXFPXGvj/view?usp=sharing
Data & Resources
Details on data use are shown below:
- For Mars atmospheric data, we used [Meteorological Station (MET) of the Phoenix Mission](https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/open-data/access-the-data.asp) | [more data](ftp://ftp.asc-csa.gc.ca/users/OpenData_DonneesOuvertes/pub/MET/)
- For Earth atmospheric data, including pressure, humidity, temperature, clouds, and more, we used [skyfield api](https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/)
- For link budget calculations, we use equations as outlined in NASA’s [Handbook for the estimation of microwave propagation effects](https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19820004428)
- For live weather data, we used [pyOWM](https://pyowm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) (Open Weather Maps)
- A reference link budget that one of the members wrote previously for a design team (with additional embedded resources) is shown here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FFffg4xKY60TkwZiTBIVU19pZD5s8zUYvF7gcuh-RC0/edit?usp=sharing