Blue Marble| Can You Hear Me Now?
Can You Hear Me Now?
Earth to Mars 🚀
Summary
Our project provides a user with an interactive webpage, showcasing a visualization of how information would travel from Earth to Mars, and vice versa. This page will offer an approximate calculation of Mars' distance from Earth, determining how long data will take to travel that distance. It will also educate users on potential obstacles during transmission, both mechanical and atmospheric.
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our team developed a webpage that visualizes the transmission of data and potential obstacles over millions of KMs between Earth and Mars.
As we progress further into the commercialization of the space industry, expertise and efficacy in communication over long distances will be crucial in supporting humanity's future endeavors.
Our webpage will provide an approximate calculation of Mars' distance from Earth and use this figure to determine how long it would take data to travel that distance. This is visualized as a bundle of static which travels at 60x speed, demonstrating the huge distances traveled in space even at the speed of light. It will also demonstrate potential obstacles in clear data transmission, such as equipment malfunctions, signal strength degradation over time, and environmental hazards such as the sun, sandstorms, clouds, and other atmospheric debris.
This project aims to visualize and bring to light important aspects of data transmission over millions of KMs in order to educate others (and ourselves) on problems which will become more and more relevant to our everyday lives as we progress technologically.
How We Developed This Project
We were inspired by the idea of exploring the challenges in sending data across space and, specifically for this challenge, to Mars.
We started by simplifying the background information as much as possible. Considering the current challenges being faced by sending data from/to Mars, we tried to come up with a way of demonstrating these challenges visually.
Our first approach was a simple locally hosted website to show an animation of the data traveling from/to Mars with the status of the data, its signal strength, the distance travelled, etc.
We used Visual Studio Code with Live Share to start coding our project using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
One of the first problems we encountered was how to get Live Share to work for all of our team members, but once we figured it out, we got ourselves organized and went to coding right away on a basic layout for the website. We started the project with only 3 group members, but along the way we recruited 2 more people that were looking for a team to join to help with the research and design portions of this challenge.
The second challenge we faced as we continued to develop our idea was finding a way to obtain a real-time distance between planets to calculate how fast the data will travel in certain conditions and dates. Since we were unable to find an api that contained the real-time data, we realized that if we wanted to make a real-time calculation on the position of Mars to Earth we would need to understand mathematics to a degree that can't be learned within two days. We made a second breakthrough when we came across this website, which used calculations to approximate the distance between the two planets. This inspired us to implement an approximate real-time calculation of the Earth/Mars distance based on the date using data from another part of the same website based off of the cos calculations for the closest and farthest points of orbital pattern of Mars within two-years.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
When we were looking for ways to obtain real-time distances between planets, we started searching for APIs or libraries to use. After searching with no avail, we reached out to CSA and they provided us with an API that we could use. However, due to time constraints and insufficient familiarity on APIs, we developed a formula that can estimate how far Mars is from Earth. This formula allows us to give users the ability to pick a date to display the current conditions and possible obstacles that might impact communication to Mars at the time. During special events, such as solar conjunction, we would show the user that communication with Mars is limited due to the Sun completely blocking Mars.
Project Demo
Above is a mockup of what our polished product would look like. Below is a screenshot of our project in its current state.
Our presentation slides with speaker notes for the presentation can be accessed here
Our presentation video can be accessed here
And a video of our website demo can be accessed here
Data & Resources
Communicating to Mars with Radio Waves
How do rovers communicate with Earth? | Science in a different light
How do we communicate with space?
How Mars rover Curiosity communicates with Earth
In what part of the electromagnetic spectrum does the Sun emit energy?
Mars Live Position and Data | TheSkyLive.com
Measurement and Analysis of Radio Wave Coverage in Industrial Environments
Opportunity's Last Message: Why did it go silent on Mars?
Phoning Home: Communicating from Mars
Radio Wave Propagation Handbook for Communication on and Around Mars
Solar System Calculator - by Don Cross