Project Herschel| Hey! What Are You Looking At?
Hey! What Are You Looking At?
Project Herschel
Summary
Create an universal astronomical database that could aggregate data from every single spacial mission, to help the development of space research and Open Innovation in the area
How We Addressed This Challenge
Our universal database will be designed with a focus on easy deployment of new features on Stellarium [1], a well known, well structured an well-revised 3-D astronomical software, that could help this great technology to improve it even more. Filling the software with missed data that already is openly available and with features that could help any user understand with more clarity what any space mission represent.
Besides the main focus of the project, the creation of an universal astronomical database could, undoubtedly, have disruptive improvements on a range of applications, even if we only take on account the challenges proposed to this years competition, such as:
Earth related Challenges
Challenge 1-1 : A One Health Approach
Challenge 1-4: Home Planet at Your Fingertips
Challenge 2-1: What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
Challenge 2-2: Automated Detection of Hazards
Challenge 5-2: Spot That Fire V3.0
Challenge 5-3: A Flood of Ideas
- This database could be used to unify all of the available data inside and outside of NASA's resources, so it can give more available of data for all it's users, making it's models more accurate
Space related Challenges
Challenge 3-1: Virtual Planetary Exploration
- An unified database could help on the creation of a unified solution to virtual exploration on any planet, since all of the data will be available in the same format
Challenge 6-2: Orbital Sky
- With this database, we could create a higher fidelity of information about satellites in the area, making it more interesting
How We Developed This Project
Our idea came from our difficulties in studying a whole variety of data from the HEASARC (High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center) and finding that to organize it in a visible manner would be too difficult, because of the technicality of de databases [2].
To develop a basic MVP of the API (database), the team proposed the unification of all databases already used by the Stellarium software. So, if there's any increment on any of those databases, it could automatically be updated to the database.
With the unification of all of the databases, we can create a database with a wide range of space missions, referencing it with the available data
And then, we can create a plugin in the Stellarium that can show all of the information about the mission and the data points that they've collected:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/njf5fRYMEnEXSTaF6 (GIF)
And also in the proposal of new features, such as the possibility of looking at the sky only on certain wavelengths, no only on the visible spectrum:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/hRvBwE7BmTvGywgA9 (GIF)
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
Our main focus is to actually integrate every single database of NASA on a single corpus
Project Demo
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Zos6X_VlI3RmDCF9LI7C0P2RGivlbhZiyDrNXofNoa8/edit?usp=sharing
Data & Resources
[1] Stellarium Documentation: https://stellarium.org/doc/head/index.html
(it uses a vast variety of databases from NASA)
[2] NAVO - HEASARC: https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/vo/summary/navo_intro.html