Spacecraft Status Visualization
Senior Project: 2001-2002
The Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP), a research
organization at the University of Colorado in Boulder, has been an active
participant in the U.S. space program since the early 1950s. Funded primarily
by NASA, members of LASP conduct fundamental research in the atmospheric and
planetary sciences, develop space instrumentation, and create computer
information systems for space operations.
One such system LASP has developed is OASIS-PS, a software system for the
planning and scheduling of experiments on spacecraft missions. OASIS-PS was
undergoing a major overhaul to coincide with the launch of a new LASP mission,
SORCE. As part of a complete rewrite of OASIS-PS, LASP wanted to add a
subsystem for displaying SORCE's groundtrack, as well as the groundtracks of
future missions.
This project provides such a satellite groundtrack subsystem which displays
the following information:
The location of the spacecraft, superimposed over a map of the Earth's coastlines. The outline of the South Atlantic Anomaly, a geographic region in which scientific measurements are invalidated. The path (or "groundtrack") the spacecraft will follow as it orbits the Earth. The Day/Night terminator, which indicates regions of Earth that are currently engulfed in darkness or light from the Sun.
The system was developed in Java as a integrated component of OASIS-PS.
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