Where’s Parker? An interactive orbit viewer for the web

We have created a “where’s Parker?” web viewer. To help navigate where our Parker spacecraft will be in the future and to better understand how close to the Sun it will be going, check out our new interactive web tool that we quickly prototyped in a week.

A freshman intern from the US Naval Academy (Abhishek Gorti) worked closely with me over the summer, and we spent a week to prototype a web development tool that everyone can use. All the software to recreate the orbit viewer is open source and available.

As an inspiration from our earlier blog about interactive touch-tables, we used D3 software web development to create an interactive display on the internet for everyone to better understand where the Parker spacecraft is going.

The telemetry data for Parker came directly from the raw orbital information, which was then saved into a simple asii format. The file is available in our open source repo linked above. So feel free to take it to better understand for yourself. [edit: here, telemetry data = position of the spacecraft relative to the Sun and planets in our solar system – sorry for the jargon] 

What other features do you think would be really cool to add? Anyone brave enough to take our repo and add something on top, maybe a circle where the planets, Venus and Mercury, are located? Let us know how you get along!!

3 thoughts on “Where’s Parker? An interactive orbit viewer for the web”

  1. hello NASA I am Evans Yawson from Ghana and I have this kind of inspiration to become an astronaut does it require me to do pure technical in high school or science it gets me frustrated I will be enrolling into high school this August and I want your advice and help which will benefit me of achieving this goal

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