Inspiration
All of us in our team have spent days in our childhood looking up at the stars and the moon wondering about what lay beyond what our eyes. We've all wondered about the wonders that NASA discovers, and so we decided to put our love for space into our project, and come up with a simple and visually appealing way to explore NASA's image database.
What it does
Our project utilizes an API to access the NASA Image and Video Library, and displays relevant data in a easy to read format that is also visually appealing. Based on user inputs on the website, our backend then sends a request through the API to get results related to our user inputs. This then returns a json file, which our program would then parse through and pick the first 12 results, displaying an image for each result and its corresponding description.
How we built it
We broke up our project into three main parts, backend development, API configuration, and frontend development. For our backend development, we used FastAPI for server-side rendering. For API configuration, we used python to send requests and for frontend development, we used Bootstrap to design our website.
Challenges we ran into
Our biggest problem is that we only had three members working on our project. Our fourth teammate never showed up, so we were short-staffed for the duration of the event. We even delayed the start of our project to give our teammate time to show up. Furthermore, because we are all beginners, we had to spend time trying to learn different frameworks and coding languages. Because of these reasons, we were at a disadvantage from the start.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Because we all are extremely new to hackathons and web development, we are all proud that we able to learn a lot through this process and become somewhat comfortable with the tools that we were using. Despite not having as many people as the other teams, we were able to put together a valid project by the end of the hackathon. We are very proud of all the progress we made in just a 12 hour period.
What we learned
We learned to communicate with an API to extract data from it and also to work with a backend framework to develop a backend server that can use SSR to send html files to the frontend.
What's next for Space Investigator
We’d like to add more features to it such as more categories to choose from and more fields to search by. It would also be cool to add other features using the other API’s provided for free by NASA such as information regarding stars/planets. Furthermore, we plan on hosting this website on a live server so it can be accessed by everyone else.
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