Hey! What Are You Looking At?
Orbit
Summary
One day in college, I walked into the physics building on campus to find students and professors running amok and excited. I found out that LIGO had detected gravitational waves, and it took me some research to visualize what happened. We decided to build Orbit to serve both those who may not get the excitement at HEASARC data at first, and for those who do. With our interface, users can choose a mission that is associated with HEASARC and this presents a 3D visualization or tabular data of the phenomenon that causes changes in a dataset for that mission. Where a layperson could be deterred from studying this data, now they can be inspired to learn more based on the visualization.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We developed a web app to visualize HEASARC data, where a user can select a mission and view a relevant dataset through either a 3D visualization. We also provide the option for the user to see the data in a table format, as provided by HEASARC. This option is more for professional scientists who prefer to visualize and study the data in table format, and this option is easily chosen by a toggle on the interface. We also provide common data on the interface during both visualization and table mode. Our intention is to create the visualizations using the data such as in this example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.04831.pdf and https://www.black-holes.org/the-science/gravitational-wave-astronomy/gw150914. This way, we can portray the visualizations more accurately and use that data. We also intend to allow users to scrub through a timeline of data changing over time, so that they can see how these events occur over a period of time.
How We Developed This Project
We love high-energy astrophysics! I have always been deeply fascinated by black holes and this project was exciting to tackle. Thinking of a way to incorporate a 3D visualization of these phenomena in the browser seemed like a fun challenge. We used HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Bootstrap, Angular, and ThreeJS to build our app. We ran into some trouble with our learning curve of these technologies, as we are relatively new to them, and we had some trouble with deploying our site. We also had trouble integrating the NASA data into the project itself, but all in all, it was a fun challenge and we learned a lot!
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Our project was inspired by data from the Swift Observatory. We looked across many datasets and gathered common data items, such as name, BII, LII, RA, and Dec, to include in our interface as common data types that scientists may look for. We also found a data sat about how objects seen from Swift changed over time, and that inspired our changing-over-time visualization.
Project Demo
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Vak8gEU8Ev4c92EP-mgWzrVK2-gIjaD5Z6V0DReG8gg/edit?usp=sharing
Project Code
Data & Resources
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/swiftgrb.html
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/swbatsfxt.html
https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/vo/summary/resources.html