Space Apps Challenge 2018

THE IDEA

Aschildren we always had many wishful dreams. One of those was to oneday see a meteorite fall from the sky and chase its outline till wereach its final destination. As a team, now we recreated thatdream by locatingthem around the globe.Our idea was to create a web portal accessible to the public, backedby an ever increasing set of diverse data such as meteoriteobservations, weather data (temperature, cloud, rainfall) andnatural disasters (fires, hurricanes and earthquakes).
Oursolution offers the audience an opportunity to select andcomprehensively visualize the data they are interested in on theglobe. Fine-grainedfiltering andsearching is available, catering to the needs of both scientists orprofessionals as well as the general public. Inaddition to these, this web application could be extended to serve as an endpointfor enriching the backing datasets, accessible to anyone authorizedto do so. Ourambition is toengagethe public as well as aid teachers, scientists and professionals intheir work. Thisproject couldbe considered an educational game for young people, but also animportant tool for adults to discover and contribute some of theirfindings to their peers.Most importantly, it could help us as a source of information to findour space Waldos!

THE TEAM

Weare 3 computer engineers,eachhaving their own background and stories. Even though Fotis’expertise areon low level programming and hardware he managed to conquer thehardships Javascript gave him, Konstantina had previous experience onspace apps and more specifically in Cesium which helped us kick startthe project and George was able to provide 3Dmodels for the system, implement them successfully but also cover therole of the graphic designer that the team needed.

WHAT WE BUILT

During the weekend we set up a rough proof of concept. We began with mockups on a piece of paper and then quickly set out to explore the tools that would enable us to materialize our idea. Our solution is a visualization of the landing sites of thousands of meteorites on a 3D globe as recorded in an open NASA dataset, built on CesiumJS. For each meteorite landing there is a mark on the earth that is proportional to the meteorite's mass. By selecting it, the user can view further information about the meteorite like its name, mass, year of discovery and coordinates. The 3D meteorite models were created in Blender3D.

FUTURE ADDITIONS

• Filtering by meteorite classification (stony, stony/iron, iron), origin (martian, lunar), time and location of landing, discovery mission (e.g. Antarctica).
• Searching for meteorites by name, id or location.
• Animating meteorite landings in time.
• Differentiating meteorite view according to classification.
• Using the user's location to display surrounding findings.
• Enabling authorized users to contribute to the dataset.
• Adding more open datasets.

ISSUES

The main issues we faced during the weekend were our lack of experience in the technologies we utilized as well as a limitation in CesiumJS (which proved to be a bug) which did not allow us to use the 3D meteorite models we had created.

THANKS

Wethank NASA and theMeteoritical Societyfor sharing an abundance of public datawhich enabled us to create thisproject.Wealso want to thank Hackerspace.gr for being an excellent hostthroughout the course of the Challenge.