Inspiration
We love satellites and space. One of us does them for a job and the other one is enchanted by them. The problem is, they are impossible to see with the naked eye or any consumer telescope because they are so small. We decided to make something to let you see them.
What it does
SkyNet lets you see the satellites above CMU in the comfort of your own computer. These are not just randomly generated! They are real satellites, and their positions are calculated using real code and real algorithms. Click around and see if you can find an important one that has a description!
How we built it
We pull real satellite orbit data in the form of TLEs from Celestrak.org. We then use state of the art algorithms to move the satellites forward in time from there. We then project this data into a sphere around the observer and render the satellites using three.js.
The satellite positions are exactly what you would see if you were standing on the cut and looking into the sky (as high-fidelity as performance allows). We wrote the whole thing in a web-app to make it accessible to everyone.
Challenges we ran into
The data for satellites is poorly organized. We had to do a lot of web scraping to get the descriptions and wrangle a lot of data that was poorly managed.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The fact that we got the pipeline working, and got to do the rendering we wanted to do was a huge triumph for us! Neither of us has any graphics experience or experience with Three.js, so we're really proud that we managed to get it done.
What we learned
We learned a lot about graphics, web-scraping, and downloading google maps panoramas (which didn't work but we still learned a lot!)
What's next for SkyNet
If we had more time, we would add more stuff than just satellites to the project! We had a cool idea of adding Hubble images in parts of the sky and you could look at them to see what is there.
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