Disconauts| Hey! What Are You Looking At?

Hey! What Are You Looking At?

The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) archives space agencies' data from missions studying electromagnetic radiation from extremely energetic cosmic phenomena (e.g., gravitational wave detections, gamma ray bursts, and supernovae). The Canadian Astronomy Data Center (CADC) is another repository containing missions studying comets, asteroids, and exoplanets among other things. Your challenge is to create a visualization tool that can help people interested in these phenomena to access the data quickly and easily.

Disconaut's Viewport

Summary

Our project is a visualization tool for the data archived in the HEASARC data archives. We use a combination of TAP and SIA to retrieve images for a mission on a specific day and display those images to a user with the timestamp and target name.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed the first steps of a visualization tool, we got Swift XRT images working and this sets the pathway for getting the other data points. This makes it easier for a non-astronomer to view the data, as they can simply get on this site and scroll through the days and see what the mission was looking at this day. For astronomers it also gives a simple timeline view that they can scroll through. We do this by using the HEASARC TAP service to find what coordinates the Swift mission was looking at that day, then we are able to search the SIA with those coordinates as the parameter. Then we search through the results and collect all images that were taken on the same day. The biggest expansion point would be to include more missions, due to the complexity of the VO interfaces we were only able to get Swift XRT images while every HEASARC mission is available. We also had to simplify our frontend interface, we originally planned on an interactive sphere but this proved difficult, so now it's a simple slideshow of what pictures were taken that day.

How We Developed This Project

Our team chose this project due to our interest in data in general. We all have worked on projects involving making data more available and to get useful analytics from it. We all have some interest in space, but get overwhelmed when you try and look at astronomical data, so tools like this are great for people like us. We used a Python web server backend using Flask and the Python VO tool to search the HEASARC data and prepare it for our React Frontend. We are hosting the project on a Ubuntu 20 digital ocean droplet. On day 1 our team had a difficult time with the HEASARC VO interface, Jeremy only read on the SIA interface and believed that would be enough for our purposes but when implementing this we noticed that it wasn't possible to search by date with this. We then spent all of day 1 frantically learning the TAP service and getting the images out. We achieved a lot in regards to this though, as we are now able to get the images for Swift XRT and have a clear idea on how to expand this to other missions.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used the HEASARC TAP interface to find the coordinates a mission is looking at on a specific date

We also used the SwiftXRT SIA interface to pull down the images for a given coordinate.

Project Demo
Project Code
Data & Resources

HEASARC TAP Service ivo://nasa.heasarc/services/xamin

Swift XR Log ivo://nasa.heasarc/swiftxrlog

Fits file viewer http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/fits/index.html

Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.