ISS Data Visualisation

ISS Data Visualisation

In one of the courses in my previous semester here at RIT relating to mobile web app development, there was a lot of development involving third-part APIs. This task gave me the freedom to use some APIs that I previously hadn't made use of. One of the really interesting API I came across while hunting was Open Notify.

Open Notify provides information about three primary aspects relating to the International Space Station.

• ISS Location Right Now
• Number of people in space right now
• Pass time of the ISS over a queried location.

Tracking the location of the ISS in real time seemed like a cool starting point for creating a data visualisation tracing the path of the ISS in terms of latitude and longitude, and see the kind of pattern generated over a fixed period of time.

The Process

Choosing Python as the programming language for this project, the requests module came in handy to call the API endpoint to generate the data about the path of the Space Station. The next step was configuring periodic tasks on a server to call the API  20 times per hour. To save the data, I uploaded an Excel sheet on the server to store the values generated every time the Python script runs.

Running this task for a period of 12 hours, I obtained a substantial amount of data relating to the movement of the ISS. The next step in this process was visualising this data keeping latitude and longitude on the axes using Matplotlib library of Python. The results of this step are shown below:

And lo! As you can see, this nice periodic pattern is generated from this visualisation script. Looks kinda cool, if you ask me. This little personal project was a success, and I look forward to extrapolating on this further to build something exciting!