Astra| Orbital Sky
Awards & Nominations
Astra has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Orbital Sky
Astra
Summary
Although there are tons of star tracking apps out there, they all seem to fall short of what matters most. Connection. Since COVID-19, connecting with others has never been more important. Astra wants to solve this by combining both data and social connections together with a cross-platform app. Astra allows anyone around the world to take a picture of the sky and immediately get all info related to the nearest satellites that orbit their coordinates every day along with users creating watch events for friends, seeing how the skies look on the other side of the world, and more. All in the hopes of spreading knowledge by bringing people together through space and technology.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We developed a mobile app that allows anyone to take a picture of the sky and returns relevant data about the satellites that orbit above them. The data that is returned includes the description, velocity, image, ext of each satellite. This data was scraped from a multitude of NASA directories, but the most notable one is the, "NASA Data & Orbit Services." In addition, users have the ability to share their finding with friends and family and open an interactive view of the globe with each satellite in their appropriate location.
How We Developed This Project
We decided to take on this challenge because we felt that the Connect category itself offered a unique perspective into how we could transcend simple data collection, and rather advance our own application and skill to incorporate certain social connection factors, considering it's most appropriate to take on a challenge which takes into consideration factors outside of data itself.
Our app has two parts, a beautiful frontend made in Flutter and a powerful home made API made with Golang.
Our API has 3 parameters: The X, Y, and Z coordinates. Our API scrapes NASA's satellite data and fetches data on satellites with these coordinates.
We had numerous challenges in our development process. The most difficult problem that we had to figure out was how to return the correct satellite based on the users longitude and latitude. Our solution was to cut up a 3d plain (with Earth as the origin) into sections. We then assigned each section a satellite. This way, a user in China will get a different satellite than a user in the USA.
Aside from the JSON data provided by the NASA Data & Orbit Services, securing a connection between the frontend and backend was quintessential towards the project's completion. With that being said, the server written in Go was hosted locally and then uploaded onto a ngrok URL so it would be much easier to communicate with app.
Flutter came into the picture for the client side, as it could be seamlessly integrated with the server side and certain web elements, along with providing a dynamic and appealing UI and UX experience for the user.
Frontend and Backend code:
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We scraped NASA's "Data & Orbit Services" directory and merged the json response from https://hpde.io/ into our own API where we simplified the output and added other relevant information from other sources. One of these sources included the NASA 4d Orbital viewer.
Project Demo
For the judges:
30 Second video: https://youtu.be/NKRD5bXOi_Q
For everyone else:
Video demo (Longer than 30s): https://youtu.be/ZGauGg-ZzlA
Project Code
Data & Resources
1) https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/data_orbits.html This is the master directory of each satellite, additionally, when the user click the button for more information, they are redirected here.
2) https://hpde.io/SMWG/Observatory/ This hosts the NASA API which returns the JSON response with details about every satellite in the directory above. This is where we got most of our data from.
3) http://www.stuffin.space/ Was rendered on the App to create an immersive 3d view of every satellite in orbit.
4) https://sscweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/tipsod/ This is the 4d NASA orbital viewer which we used to obtain the satellites coordinates.