Cosmotrack

A 3D visualization tool to track satellites, stations and more revolving around Earth.

Features

• 3D earth rendered, can be rotated with mouse, and rotates around its own axis according to the real time.
• Satellite and stations live movement around Earth
• Details Panel showed for selected objects
• Adding Sun, and moon, so that Earth can be revolved around the Sun, and adding more physics on it.....

Getting started

• Download the requirements - pip install -r requirements.txt

• Run the engine py -m cosmotrack.core.engine

Documentation

Cosmostrack is made using panda3D graphics library and skyfield. The tle data is taken from celestrak - NORAD, thanks to their free api. For the satellites - satellite data For the space stations - stations data

Data extraction and satellite tracking

The data is fetched inside data\tle_fetcher.py. The number of active or the satellites is huge (approx 14K to 15K). That is why we render only about 30. And the number of stations is relatively very small, so we render all of them.

Inside data\satellite_tracker.py, we use skyfield. In the getPosition() function, we get lat, lon, alt from the tle data, by passing the data to the EarthSatellite class of skyfield and getting subpoint using the wgs84. The x,y,z components are also calculated here. (More on that inside the render part)

Rendering

renderer foler The main file that renders the window is window.py

• setup3DScene is setting up the lighting, rotating the mouse, rotating the earth, and has the main sceneRoot. The rotation of earth is kept as real as possible. (HPR - Head, Pitch, Roll)
• sideBarHandler is the left navbar, and where all the other things are made. Also you can see that most of the things whether it is the navbar, or a dropdown, is a DirectFrame.
• selectArtificialObject - Gives options - Satellites, Stations, None. For selecting Satellites and Stations, it calls the updateObjectList and initializeSatellites functions.
  • initializeSatellites function, generates a small circle for each element in the Satellite list, and also adds them to the object made for the satellite_tracker.py.
  • updateSatellitesTask is to update the positions continuously with the help of latLonAltTo3D function of satellite_tracker.py
  • The selected satellite/station from the dropdown will be highlighted as green and rest as red.
• There is a right details panel as well, which shows lat, lon, alt and hemisphere details.

The naturalobjects.py is for creating Earth as a smooth sphere. The createSphere is used for creating smooth sphere with desired radius and segments. The more the number of segments the smoother the sphere.

• vertex, normal, texcoord is used for drawing vertices, normals and texture. vformat = GeomVertexFormat.getV3n3t2() gives V3->3D positions, n3 -> 3D normal vectors, t2 -> texture (u,v -> horizontal,vertical (btw 0 and 1))
• The latitude varies from 0 deg to 180 deg (N to S) represented by theta. The longitude varies from 0 deg to 360 deg, represented with phi. So the cartesian coordinates are represented as -

  • x = r * cos(phi) * sin(theta)

  • y = r * sin(phi) * sin(theta)

  • z = r * cos(theta) This is done in the first nested loop.

  • In the second loop, triangles are drawn accordingly. As squares cannot be draw, i.e, why two triangles are drawn.

In the same way, the small circles are created in artificialobjects.py

The main loop is inside the core\engine.py.

Screenshots

Contributing and Support

If you liked it, please give a star to my project. All contributors are welcomed. You can raise issues or directly raise a PR (if possible describe the features/bug). I would definitely appreciate if you can integrate new features or future features.