Discovery Six - Space Apps Challenge

Discovery Six| Home Planet at Your Fingertips

Awards & Nominations

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

Global Nominee

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.

Our project title is DSIX. It reflects an important aspect of our app which is “discovery”.

Summary

DSIX is designed and implemented so that it can offer opportunities for discovering and interpreting data from different social and scientific categories. Since it uses a simple UI associated with a wide scope, people can easily benefit from it. One important aspect that we paid a lot of attention to is interpreting data. This is the main goal of our application.All the data that is processed in the DSIX app, is displayed in graphical form, hence making the application more friendlier than the “raw data” datasets which scientists are used to see and work with. We considered friendly UI as an integral piece in the DSIX software without ignoring the scientific part.

How We Addressed This Challenge

We developed this application because it was necessary to “bring the earth data closer to the people”. This was because of all the huge and detailed datasets which made it hard for the common user to know what is happening inside that dataset.

It is important because it offers users with little knowledge of going through datasets, the opportunity to easily view and arrive at conclusions which would be difficult with raw data.

In addition to being very easy to use, DSIX is also used to form simple bar datagrams to see how values have moved over the years. If we had the opportunity to further develop our application, we would have added many other functions with more countries with more databases and become more interactive by having even easier access to the application. Affected by the shortage of time, we only offered these kinds of services for Europe countries.

How We Developed This Project

After being aware of the amount of data available, we thought of ways that data could be maintained. If we analyze it thoroughly, we can see the changes data has taken over the time. Above all we thought about all companies to be able to use it very easily and effectively. We first ideated the UI and the main functions of the application. After that we started programming.

DSIX is implemented completely in JAVA, making use of different libraries some of which are: File.io, javax.swing, java.awt and so on.

We used javax.swing for developing the UI. This was completed using Eclipse IDE. Some other parts were developed using jGrasp IDE and some using NetBeans IDE. With an interesting, but advanced project, we ran into some challenges. One of the first (and biggest) problems we faced was finding datasets. We managed to surpass this problem through teamwork. The other problems were mostly technical. One of the first achievements we had as a team was creating the analytic window. This was the most important part of the application.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used data from NASA satellites, more specifically we used data from NASA Earthdata about global fire emissions indicators. We also used data from European Open Data Portal (EUODP) concerning PM2.5 concentration in European countries. Overall, as a team we can say that these databases showed us the scope of NASA’s coverage of information going from temperatures to social factors. We used these datasets to perform data analysis and arrived to some conclusions that weren’t as we first thought.