Eye of Horus

Eye of Horus| 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.

Summary

Eye of Horus is a web application designed to solve our challenge, "Orbital Sky." It's a simulation of the Earth, the surrounding satellites, space debris, and displays all of their information and data when asked, like an interactive 3D map. Created using HTML, CSS, JS, and open source (Three.min.js and Tween.js.) This application can be used as a new educational area because it is easy to access and free open source, aiming to improve general knowledge of satellites. It satisfies the curiosity and passion for learning.

How We Addressed This Challenge

The project we developed is a web application with the globe simulation, satellites and space debris orbiting it using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and a lot of its libraries and is called Eye of Horus. Eye of Horus is free and available for everyone to use in educational or researching purpose. The project also will help widen the people’s eyes to the instruments flying overheads and how they operate to ease their daily tasks. The application can view over 16000 satellites and debris, and the user can display the orbit of his targeted satellite. The application is also provided with search engine that allows the user to search for any satellite or space debris out there. The search engine also allows the user to classify the satellites according to many characteristics as the launching country, launching date, type (Junk, Not Junk), size, there role and the altitude from the globe. What I want to achieve is the success of the application in helping people in discovering more about what is over their heads and how it helps them in daily life. I also wish if the application would be able to help scientists in their researches or help the students learn something new.

How We Developed This Project

We used Nasa’s resources to get data about the satellites and space debris as their size, names and how they still orbiting the Earth. Then we searched for the previous projects aimed to solve this challenge but sadly we didn’t find previous projects worked targeting our challenge’s requirements, so we developed the app from scratch. After getting a data base from ESRI, an international supplier of geographic information system software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications. Many programming languages we used in building the web application as:

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. Tags and attributes are used to create the main page structure and its functionality, like insert the images, text, inputs, etc.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML by controlling colors and sizes of attributes, and it is the main factor to create the UI of the website by using classes and ID.

JS (JavaScript), It has curly-bracket syntax, dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation, and first-class functions; used to make the website more active by creating animated motion as the stars in the home page using (animations.js).

jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animation, and Ajax. It was used in styling, and the animation like buttons and scroll.

Bootstrap.js and bootstrap-slider are open-source CSS framework directed at responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. It contains CSS and JavaScript-based design templates for typography, forms, buttons, navigation, and other interface components. IT was used to make the web responsive, button styles and input elements.

ArcGIS API for JavaScript is a geographic information system for working with maps and geographic information maintained by the Environmental Systems Research Institute and was used for mapping and analysis.

Google Earth Engine is a public data catalog, compute infrastructure, geospatial APIs, and an interactive app server and was used to simulation the Earth.

Google Fonts, a library of 1005 free licensed font families, an interactive web directory for browsing the library, and APIs conveniently using the fonts via CSS and Android and was used to add more beautiful, readable, accessible fonts as Orbitron and Oswald.

Satellite-js. A library to make satellite propagation via TLEs possible on the web. Provides the functions necessary for SGP4/SDP4 calculations, as callable JavaScript. It also provides functions for coordinate transforms. It was used to convert the downloaded TLE file into geographic locations.

Finally, the application was hosted on AWS free hosting with domain (.live)

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

First, we used the articles and resources released by NASA in reading and discovering more about the satellites and debris and why they still orbit the Earth (Space debris and Human spacecrafts). Then we got our application’s idea from NASA’s released resources as we got the idea of simulation from the API worldwind released by NASA which is a simulation for the globe from the satellites perspective, then we compared between this API and other ones choosing the one more compatible with our application. We also used SSC RESTful API to get the idea of tracking the satellites location and chose the more compatible with the rest of components used.