Inspiration
When Opportunity ended its 14-year mission in 2018, it had lasted far longer than the initial 90-day expectation. There was an outpouring of support from the space community, and this project is a tribute to the very successful rover.
What it does
Takes in coordinates on Earth and returns real-time distance to the remains of the rover.
How we built it
We used the JPL Horizons query system and built our own query using coordinates supplied by the user.
Challenges
The main challenge was figuring out how to actually get the straight-line distance across the Solar System from an arbitrary point on Earth to a fixed point on Mars. Earth and Mars are both in elliptical orbits with different periods and as a result their distance varies widely over time. In addition, the effects of the rotation of both bodies mean that there are smaller variations to take into account since (even ignoring the much larger orbital effects) the distance between the two points could vary by as much as the diameter of both planets over the course of a day. Much of our time was spent combing through documentation for NASA's JPL Horizons query system (https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons/) and building a program to automatically generate a query in the proper format for the distance between the two points based on the user input of their coordinates on Earth.
Built With
- jpl-horizons
- python
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