nasAR| Orbital Sky
Awards & Nominations
nasAR has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!
Orbital Sky
Augmented Reality Satellite Viewer/Tracker App
Summary
We set out to build an iOS app that could display and track in augmented reality the brightest satellites overhead and provide predictions and notifications to the user when visible passes would take place. We wanted to also display major stars and planets above and below the horizon. The goal is to help people discover and learn about the amazing satellites in orbit overhead.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We did a lot of market research and found the products out there are already quite advanced. We wanted to put emphasis on actually seeing/finding satellites. A phase 2 goal would be to add interactivity in the form of "Did you see it?" and to possibly gamify the experience of spotting natural and artificial satellites. The app works by opening it and allowing access to your camera and your location. With that information we would be able to overlap the position of major satellites and their trajectories, along with predicted times of next visibility, to help people get out into the world, see something new, and hopefully look up at the sky with even more wonder than they had before. The app works by using ARkit and RealityKit in Swift and by importing data from the many available satellite data APIs and star/planet databases.
How We Developed This Project
We were inspired by having arguments with friends about being able to see satellites from Earth with the unaided eye. The best proof is to point up at the sky and show someone the ISS flying overhead, and this task is made much easier with Augmented Reality (AR). We had never developed an AR application or a iOS native application before, but had the tools installed, so we chose Swift on Xcode as our development environment. Learning a new langue and toolset was a challenge, but we had a lot of fun learning what was possible and what challenges we would face. (It turns out AR has a view-limit, so after calculating where something exists in orbit, it has to be scaled so it will appear in the AR world!) We leaned heavily on existing API's for satellite data and star/planet data. We feel having stars and planets in the AR view does a lot to enhance the experience and can help peak the user's curiosity about the cosmos. There were a lot of datasets and documentation to dig through, and we had to dust off our old celestial geometry skills for this challenge! In the end we were successful in importing NASA's 3D model of the ISS and manipulating it in an AR environment in an iOS app. We were also successful in placing an API call to find the ISS' current GPS coordinates. We fell short at putting those two together, let alone incorporating proper TLE data to plot trajectory and calculate flyover times, but we had a lot of fun learning and are happy with the progress we made this weekend!
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used NASA's 3D model of the ISS from https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/2378/international-space-station-3d-model/
We also used ISS location data from open-notify.org. Future work would utilize additional satellite location data from n2yo, space-track.org, and NASA's SSC, an Earth model from NASA's WorldWind, star data from NASA's BSC5P database, and planet data from JPL's DE421 ephemeris database.
Project Demo
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17goSALinffrYbSt3GsHHJvJRwztgzJPj/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ie9x3F5N7MmHqlNAKvJkbnZWVqVy49Xu/view?usp=sharing
Project Code
Data & Resources
http://open-notify.org/
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/2378/international-space-station-3d-model/
Additional work planned, but not yet integrated:
https://www.space-track.org
https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/
https://sscweb.gsfc.nasa.gov/WebServices/REST/
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/star-catalog/bsc5p.html
https://www.n2yo.com/api/
https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/planets.html