Space Apps Challenge 2018

THE IDEA

As children we always had many wishful dreams. One of those was to one day see a meteorite fall from the sky and chase its outline till we reach its final destination. As a team, now we recreated that dream by locating them around the globe. Our idea was to create a web portal accessible to the public, backed by an ever increasing set of diverse data such as meteorite observations, weather data (temperature, cloud, rainfall) and natural disasters (fires, hurricanes and earthquakes).
Our solution offers the audience an opportunity to select and comprehensively visualize the data they are interested in on the globe. Fine-grained filtering and searching is available, catering to the needs of both scientists or professionals as well as the general public. In addition to these, this web application could be extended to serve as an endpoint for enriching the backing datasets, accessible to anyone authorized to do so. Our ambition is to engage the public as well as aid teachers, scientists and professionals in their work. This project could be considered an educational game for young people, but also an important tool for adults to discover and contribute some of their findings to their peers. Most importantly, it could help us as a source of information to find our space Waldos!

THE TEAM

We are 3 computer engineers, each having their own background and stories. Even though Fotis’ expertise are on low level programming and hardware he managed to conquer the hardships Javascript gave him, Konstantina had previous experience on space apps and more specifically in Cesium which helped us kick start the project and George was able to provide 3D models for the system, implement them successfully but also cover the role 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

We thank NASA and the Meteoritical Society for sharing an abundance of public data which enabled us to create this project. We also want to thank Hackerspace.gr for being an excellent host throughout the course of the Challenge.