Baby Yoda - Space Apps Challenge

Baby Yoda| Orbital Sky

Orbital Sky

A huge number of satellites in Earth's orbit support our day-to-day life on the ground. Your challenge is to develop a method to improve public knowledge of these satellites, with an eye towards driving user engagement, enthusiasm, and exploration.

Orbit-X

Summary

With an aim to develop a tool to improve public knowledge about the various Satellites around the Earth, we created a website and a 3D application with a very user interactive UI - particularly targeting the novice, advanced beginner and competent audiences.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Existing websites are not very user friendly and have a dull and unattractive interface. In order to target novice and expert audience we are providing a user-friendly animated website which provides information & facts about the existing satellites. People are likely to spend more time accessing the website if they find it interactive and user friendly and hence we'll be able to provide knowledge on a large scale. Space related topics are never-ending and we don't want people to loose interest in space. So we tried to do things differently and ended up developing a website which provides a 3D view of satellites revolving around the earth. We further developed the 3D model using Unity to display trajectory of satellite revolving around the earth along with their real time positioning. Visualizing the whole system in 3D gives the user a whole new dynamic way of learning about orbital sky.

How We Developed This Project

Unable to find any beginner friendly, yet informative resources regarding the satellites, we knew that was exactly what we wanted. Being able to connect novice enthusiasts to the outer space using an interactive platform was what we were all invested in. Considering how magnificent and limitless the Universe is, interactive tools can also be influencing to the youth to explore further.

We created a website as well as a 3D application to address the given problem. For the web application, we used the flask framework using python, HTML5, CSS and javascript. For the 3D application, we used the Unity 3D software with C# language.

None of us had prior experience with Unity or C#, so it was very time consuming to learn the simplest of functions like adding a component from scratch. It was also a little challenging to work from separate places.

As for the achievements, being able to combine every member's skills and putting them into the use for the best result was definitely one of them. And also finally creating a working product using Unity and the learning experience throughout was amazing.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

Apart from the UCS Satellite Database that we used to get the list of satellites, we further got data from the NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive. Since our project is all about Satellites - it has data interpreted and visualized in ways easier for a newbie to understand.