 Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here. So I'm a web developer and I like to make things and do side projects and my friend and collaborator Arielle Waldman and I we have a number of space websites space themed websites that We work on and we were between projects and we wanted to do something new and There's something that we thought was missing on the internet that we wanted to see and that was a site where you could Go and just see very simply all the active space probes that are out there exploring the solar system right now NASA has some cool websites and they have a lot of space probes out there But the United States is not the only country with a space program China Japan India and the european space agency which is a collaboration of 22 member states I'll have active space programs There's a cool wikipedia page that's pretty good about listing the current active space probes But we love great design and beautiful websites And so we wanted to make something beautiful to look at sort of an art project if you will I was super inspired by this website. How many people are in space right now? .com It's just a very simple beautiful way to instantly see how many people are in space. So right now there's five There's five astronauts on the international space station And if you scroll on this website, you'll you can get just a little more information their names and how long they've been there So I wanted to see something like this for the robotic probes that are out there in the solar system So we bought a domain name Thank you country of spain for that dot es extension We got cute and clever with our url and it's nearly impossible to explain verbally Our website url to anybody, but and then we made a website So we experimented with a couple of different designs. We looked at actual images of spacecraft and Artists renderings and nothing was really working and then ariel who's a fantastic visual designer came up with this idea for these cutouts these silhouettes And we created this website. So if you load up our home page And scroll you can see this is all the active space missions All the probes that are out there right now that are still communicating with earth and that are beyond earth orbit And we're maintaining this we take one down when it for instance crashes into a comet or we When one gets launched and escapes earth gravity, we add it to the site And if you click one of those boxes You'll just get a page of information a summary of the mission The organization is responsible for maintaining it Where it's going what it's doing and some links to further Explore things about it. And again, this is international all all the countries are represented here We use jekyll jekyll is a static static site generator We really liked it. It's it made it really easy for us to work together She's mostly the design and content and i'm the techie And it separates those two very nicely and it's very easy to deploy But when we were shopping this idea around to our friends What we asked them what would you want to see in a website about space probes and We heard this over and over they want to see data. They want the data from the space missions But this is easier said than done if you think about a spacecraft It's like this vehicle where we've attached a bunch of instruments almost up to a dozen sometimes And each one of those instruments is a very specialized thing and Often they have dozens of people working on instruments alone and often those instrument teams don't even talk to each other They're that specialized And these teams plan the observations and they handle the data and they put them out on the web and it can be very Distributed to find the data and also it's kind of some sometimes the data is kind of weird It's not all tabular data. It's not all images Sometimes it's multi-dimensional data. Sometimes it's Sensor readings and things like that Not to mention different missions and different countries have different policies about releasing their data So we couldn't be the portal to all things data for all the probes But we did find one piece of data that we thought Was kind of cool and kind of connected you to the space probes in real time And so i'll talk about how we did that So in my view there's essentially three main ways to find planetary mission data online The first and most popular is search tools These are websites where you go fill out a web form and you hit submit and you get results and then you can download Your results much like a shopping cart. Um, there's tons of these They vary widely in usability. Uh, they serve different communities And there's that's a whole ecosystem and a whole domain to itself if you're lucky There's an api if you go to data dot nasa dot gov They're collecting apis here. They're documented. They serve json. They're very nice. It's by no means exhaustive But it's a great start and there's a lot of cool stuff there The third way is web scraping. Um, there's a lot of cool nasa images. Um, know what to Um, it that's kind of locked up in old websites And so a good way to get at nasa images and data is to actually web scraping And I usually recommend a tool for python called beautiful soup Because when I was a beginning python programmer, I found it very intuitive to use that So web scraping is a way Sometimes though, there's an undocumented api Um, and that's what we did. So I'll tell you how we did that So when you send a, um A space probe into space you have to communicate with it. So there's a worldwide network of Um radio dishes operated by nasa There are three locations on the earth and they all have several dishes there and they listen all day and night to radio signals from space probes Um, and they have a really cool website DSN now where you can look in real time and see what they're up to so there's three, um rows here And that's the three locations and um You can see all the dishes there that are active at those three locations And so if you click one of those and here I've clicked One of the goldstone locations goldstone is down outside of barstow in california If you click that on the right side, you'll see what spacecraft it's communicating with and it also knows how far away that spacecraft is Right there it says range range is like a term for the shortest distance from one thing to the other So that's the distance from earth to voyager right now 20.4 billion kilometers when I took this slide So we wanted that we wanted that piece of information for our website Um, so there's this tool. Um, it's a fire flocks plugin. It's called live http headers There's similar tools for chrome. Um web tools So if you if you load up a web page and open this plugin, uh, you'll be able to see, um The the background http calls that the website is making so you can leave this page and open your browser all day And it will update in real time what the dishes are doing and the way it's doing that It's it's making a remote server call every few seconds. Um to this To this other server and so this plugin will reveal to you what that what that server is and the important thing is the url So we grab that url And we open it up in the browser And this is what we got. Um, which is not um terribly encouraging Um, it's kind of a wall of xml. Um, this is my reaction basically But python to the rescue there is a python library called xml to dict Which is a utility that turns xml into a python dictionary So it makes working with python working with xml much like working in json Makes it much more easier to read this feed So now we can see we can sort of look at this feed and read it So the top level is dsn deep space network And then there's a list of locations canberra is the one in australia And then there's a list of dishes that are operating when it took this this um, this reading So first it goes through some things about the pointy angle and the time and the wind speed at the dish But then there's this target field and if you look at that, um, there's this name field in there And there's this code and if you dig into the dsn website You'll find a list of codes that actually correspond to spacecraft names. Um, so we were able to Translate these codes into spacecraft names. Um, and then there's that field up leg range I don't really know what up leg and down leg means but range looks familiar and those numbers Turn out to match what we saw on that website. So that's actually the distance to the spacecraft So we put this python script up on heroku and turned on a redis scheduler Or i'm sorry on a heroku scheduler And it goes off every 10 minutes and it scrapes that xml feed and we save it to our own sort of json object That is ordered by spacecraft code and then takes saves the last distance We're using redis on heroku. It's just a way to save a persistent json data store And then we wrapped it in a flask app so that we have our now our own json api that is just serving spacecraft names and distance and that is how We're able to order these so these are actually ordered by the farthest distance At the top the space probes that are farthest away here of orager of orager 2 And new horizons which are way out in the outer solar system And that's how we're able to display the distance the current distance Or the least the latest known distance, which turns out to be pretty accurately the current distance To spacecraft and then we have these clicky things that you can actually reorder by launch date, which is hard coded But also by distance. So that's how we do that Thank you