We created this project as part of the hths.hacks() hackathon on noon of May 21st to noon of May 22nd. The goal behind the project was to bring awareness to space by having information about it be readily accessible. With all our hard work we won an HONORABLE MENTION along with a $10 amazon gift card. Look at page 13 of the closing ceremony to see our names listed.
Space Query is a user friendly system that informs users about space (see main.py to see how we used pygame to do this).
One of the main features is the search query. The user can enter a question they have about space and the computer will respond. The system works on a machine learning algorithms that tries to match the most fitting sentence from several wikipedia pages to answer the query (see query.py).
We have another feature that simulates the movement of planets based on the physics and the forces of gravity. We don't just make the planets circle the sun, instead the program calculate the force exerted on it by the sun and all other planets. Then based on this force exerted on the planet and its previous velocity. Look at orbit.py for how this is done. A thanks to techwithtim's Python Planet Simulation for guiding us in the creation of orbit.py.
Lastly, we included a feature that informs users on where the iss is in live time (see iss.py). If we had more time we would have liked to include some more features the help inform users about what is happening in space to bring more awareness to OUTERSPACE!
We ran into several difficulties from fingering out what project we wanted to create to not being able to download libraries on different operating systems. Some of us also had to learn new languages (pygame specifically) as others taught it to them. We didn't have much time left after finishing the orbit.py to include it into the main website. With only 30 minutes on the clock, we worked together and divided up to tasks in order to include that component in out final design In general, though developing Space-Query we encountered many challenges but we continued to persevere and finally created a working product.
There were many different libraries, languages, and APIs we had to learn when creating this project. But, most importantly we learned how to work in a team. How to divide up the work based on strengths and weakness and how to communicate with each-other while being productive. For 2/3 of use, hths was our first hackathon and we learned a lot of important skills like teamwork and time-management though this process.