Nasa Orbit Tracker

Ship #1

@Eclipse on Nasa Orbit Tracker · about 2 months ago

I made a terminal-based NASA Orbit Tracker that pulls live telemetry data from NASA's Near-Earth Object REST API to scan the sky for passing asteroids in our night sky. (Tho it only works for Earth, so sadly aliens won't be able to try it out 🗿)

The biggest challenge was wrestling with deep-nested JSON payloads to pull exact diameter and velocity variables, plus translating boring raw Joules into something dramatic: Hiroshima Atomic Bomb equivalents using classical kinetic energy equations (0.5 * m * v^2).
Though it was worth it, not *that* difficult per se, but something new.

Making this project made me revise my dusty python skills that I learnt like 2-3 years ago.

I'm proud of hitting a flawless 200 connection status with NASA's live servers and formatting the terminal loop with clean, custom conditional hazard indicators without any errors (for now, and in future too, hopefully)

To test it, clone the repo, drop your NASA API key (or use the DEMO_KEY) into the main.py file, pip install requests, and fire up main.py! And try out thousand different ways Earth could've ended. (Just kidding 💀✌🏻)

2 devlogs
3h
9.65x multiplier
30 Stardust

Try project → See source code →

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@Eclipse on Nasa Orbit Tracker · about 2 months ago

1h 14m 22s logged

Day-2 Devlog: NASA Orbit Tracker v1 Completed!
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v1 of the program is live on Github.
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What I added:

Kinetic Energy engine to get the impact energy of the asteroids.
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For better comparison, added Hiroshoma Atomic bomb as comparison.
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Polished terminal UI controls: Handled inline conditional formatting for real-time hazard flags cleanly and fixed nested string bugs in the terminal loop.

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@Eclipse on Nasa Orbit Tracker · about 2 months ago

1h 50m 9s logged

Day-1 Devlog: NASA Orbit Tracker Main Control Flow Established! ☄️
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Spent like 2 hrs setting up the baseline architecture for my project yesterday night.
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What I got working:
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Connected successfully to the live NASA NEO (Near Earth Object) API with code 200.
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Added dynamic date parsing so it queries exactly what is passing our Earth today.
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Added custom HTTP error tracking (handling 429 rate limits and server errors professionally (okay maybe not professionally but cleanly 🗿)).
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Established the base of an interactive terminal selection loop that lets user pick which specific asteroid they want to audit.
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Pushed everything to my GitHub repository with the commit message “Established Control flow”.
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Today, I’ll build the core physics engine and orbital mechanics calculations next, along with completing the interactive terminal..!!