AIDA - Space Apps Challenge

AIDA| Home Planet at Your Fingertips

Awards & Nominations

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

Global Finalist

Home Planet at Your Fingertips

Develop a user-friendly application or tool to discover, visualize, and analyze NASA Earth data for monitoring our home planet.

AIDA - A visualization and demonstration website for NASA NEO and USGS datasets

Summary

AIDA (Astronomical Images and Datasets Analysis toolkit) is a tool that can be used by educators, researchers or any inquisitive individual for literally viewing the world from a different perspective. AIDA uses NASA NEO, MODIS, Landsat and USGS datasets which can be easily viewed, analysed and used to discover hidden facts by monitoring our home planet. In order to visualize the data in an interactive manner, AIDA uses WorldWindWeb so that the users can get a vivid displayand play with the datasets at the same time.

How We Addressed This Challenge

AIDA is a fun data visualisation tool which uses data obtained from NASA Earth Observations, MODIS, Landsat and USGS. AIDA renders a globe using worldwind web thus making its easy for the user to study the data while also making it interactive for users who are there just for some infotainment.

It was important for us to develop something like AIDA as in most of the sites which helps in NASA earth data visualization literally opens up the entire world map takes up a lot of time. With AIDA you can break up the data into your convinient size and can concentrate at a particular region or you can look at the Big Picture all togather.

AIDA makes use of the Imagery API, takes the images and shows it as a web map service using the worldwind web. We have provided some sample layers which we think might have greater significance over others. We will be adding more layers for users to provide a wide range of information under a single roof.

We hope to make a complete site where you get to visualize, query, store and download you datasets of your choice from whatever data is available using NASA APIs and to make it more interactive for users of all age range.

Land Surface Temperature WMS from MODIS (above)

Leaf Area Index WMS from (below) in AIDA

Apart from the above two examples, AIDA also has an Earthquake Visualistation tool, where users can query and see the epicenters of the earthquakes that happened between the queried period.

It also shows a histogram of the magnitudes and a time-series of the plots. It has multiple projections allowing the users to get visualize the data according to their needs.

For now AIDA is Restricted to only some earth observation datasets, but we hope we could add some more interactive dashboards like earthquake visualisers to help datascientists, educators and developer community to a huge but at the same time concise data.

For more information about AIDA and fiddling with its tools, you can checkout AIDA livehere.

How We Developed This Project

After seeing some sample sites provided by the Challenge resources, we realised we can build an upgraded version of these sites, keeping the overall view concise but informative and interactive at the same time. Basically we aimed at serving the huge data within your grip.

So we decide a workflow pattern for our team.

But first we needed to create the globe, so we used nasa worldwind for it.

Tech stack used:

->Python

->Javascript

->Flask

->HTML

->CSS

->Bootstrap

->jQuery templates

->requireJS

->plotlyJS

->Heroku

Then we use HTML and Javascript for making the frontend. At first for the globe we generate it using worldwind web. We then add the blue marble layer to it. And then we dynamically add the Dataset mask over the blue marble layer. Over it we add the atmosphere layer.

For the earthquake visualiser, we design a query parameter dropdown where the user can select the timestamp for the dataset that they want. We also add two sorting methods, one by time and the other by magnitude. We take the USGS earthquake dataset and create histograms for average and highest magnitude and timeseries data plot. Each of these plots can be saved to the local device by clicking on the camera icon. All these plots were done using plotlyJS-a graphing library.

For styling we use Bootstrap templates and CSS. We also used jQuery for seamless loading of the Worldwind globe. We use requireJS for some cdn functionalities.

For backend we choose python and flaskmicroframework, as its easy to create and powerful at the same time.

Then we deploy our project with the help of heroku. We create an automatic deploy or CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) for our master branch. Which means whatever changes we push to the master branch get deployed in the site hassle free.

The problems which we faced are making the website interactive for every users and breaking down the data to small sections along with the entire data to be served at the same site.

We have solved this problem to certain extent. The only thing left for us to do is to add more data and some query parameters.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We have used NASA Earth Observations, MODIS, Landsat and USGS Earthquake dataset.

We have used the Earth Observations Datasets from NASA Earth observations and Nasa GIBS.

For average land and sea surface temperature we use the MODIS Datasets.

For chlorophyll, NO2 and CO Datasets we use GIBS.

We have used the USGS earthquake data to create the earthquake visualiser where the user can query over a period and can arrange them according to magnitude or according to time.

For the Aerial labels we use the bing map data and for tectonic plates we use the tectonic plates layers.