Earth and Cosmos - Space Apps Challenge

Earth and Cosmos | Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

Awards & Nominations

Earth and Cosmos has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History

NASA’s activities in space have brought new knowledge of the Earth, inspiring new ways of thinking about humanity and the planet. However, many people aren’t aware that NASA studies the Earth in addition to other planets. Your challenge is to tell stories of NASA’s Earth science enterprise using interactive digital tools. This will test your technical skills and your ability to think like a historian or educator.

Earth and Cosmos - A Meteorite Landings Journey

Summary

Our project aim to provide data for Earth sciences enterprises using Digital tools. We have collected information from various trusted sources and space agenices. We have connected the available meteorites landings datas from NASA's APIs to a 3D spacial visualization framework. In browser. The goal is to show an interactive and representative way of meteorites landings in recent history...

How We Addressed This Challenge

We have provided the information about EARTH SCIENCES , History of our Planet and what could be the future of Earth.

We developed a web based application which allows visitors to travel in the meteorites landings history on Earth. It represents meteorites impacts on Earth with respect of their mass and consequent impact. Visitor can drag and zoom on a rotating Earth and use the slide to travel in time of meteorites landings history.

How We Developed This Project

First we browsed all around datas and APIs resources provided by Nasa and searched for datas that could be interesting to represent graphically in a 3D visualization framework. We found a dataset containing all detected meteorites impacts on earth from 861 to 2013 with their mass and other interesting informations.

Second we searched for a 3D spacial visualization framework to inject the datas that comes from the API. We choose PlanetaryJS which is a Javascript framework to deal with planets and "ping" impacts. It has already been used for earthquake "pings". That was a good base to start with.

Involved code is Python / Javascript / CSS

VIM was used for file edition

Domain name comes from an offer from hackathon's partner

Achievements :

1/ We've a working Proof of Concept \o/

2/ In a very short period of time, we, team of 6, spread around the planet , and never been in touch before, have been able to contruct this prototype !

Difficulties encountered :

1/ Data structure between NASA API and those required to feed PlaneteryJS were different. So we needed to convert the original structure to something acceptable for the 3D framework.

2/ We use the meteorite mass information to represent the visual impact and the scale was (and is still) very hard to manage when you have lot of datas.

3/ We included the important data and research which is related to our challenge.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used a Meteorite Landings dataset from NASA https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/meteorite-landings-api

Each meteroite landing is structured like :

{

"name": "Aachen",

"id": "1",

"nametype": "Valid",

"recclass": "L5",

"mass": "21",

"fall": "Fell",

"year": "1880-01-01T00:00:00.000",

"reclat": "50.775000",

"reclong": "6.083330",

"geolocation": {

"latitude": "50.775",

"longitude": "6.08333"

}

During the hackathon we used the year / latitude / longitude and mass informations. Mass information was used to render the "ping" impact in the 3D spacial visualization framework. This was a very inspiring data to develop our project.