Inspiration

We wanted to build something visually cool and fun

What it does

You click and explore the world using this fun interactive javascript earth tool

How I built it

This came from a fork from an opensource repo called cambecc/earth. We added additional features on top of it, namely by clicking a randomize button you are taken to a place of interest around the world. This place generally has something NASA related too

Challenges I ran into

Figuring out where to insert our own custom functionality into the repo was difficult. A lot of debugging and console log statements were required. Some of the NASA API's are incredibly complex, but luckily this one just required an insertion point of longitude and latitude

I had to load in geolocation data from various points in the world. I tried personally to get the database loaded in with that data, but I ended up formatting CSV data from data.gov into the JSON format we needed. Because we were short on time, I dumped the entire JSON file right where the logic button gets called. There are only 200 countries of interest, so this data payload is fairly small and doesn't change by much

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I wrote the randomizer logic function, I used windows.href.url for the first time to append the geolocation URL. Most of the commits on my end I just submitted to the other teammate who pushed it up, because we had git issues

What I learned

I learned how 3D geolocation tools work

What's next for NASA-Space-Apps-2018

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