Icarus

landing page
heat map

Inspiration

Our journey began reading about the 1859 Carrington Event, a solar storm so powerful it knocked out telegraph networks and even caused fires, coupled with a childhood fascination with auroras. I wanted a single, browser‑based platform that could:
Give us detailed information about these solar flares and other beautiful phenomena on a realistic globe.

What It Does

Solar Flare & CME Heatmap & Plotter
- Fetches the last 30 days of FLR and CME events from NASA’s DONKI APIs.
- Projects each event’s heliographic coordinates onto Earth lat/long.
- Builds a Gaussian KDE heatmap that glows red where activity clusters, fading to blue in quieter zones.
- Also displays pinpointed regions where Solar Flares and CMEs have impacted the earth using vertical rods
- Users can toggle between flares, CMEs, or both, and pick any custom date range going back to 2010
Auroral Forecast
- Pulls NOAA’s 24‑hour Kp‑index forecast every minute.
- Converts each Kp value into a latitude boundary (e.g. Kp 2 → ~75° lat, Kp 7 → ~55° lat).
- Renders glowing rings of points at those latitudes for both hemispheres.
- A clickable timeline lets you scrub through each hour and see the oval shift in real time.
Interactive Information sections
- News section for the latest space related news.
- Timeline showis a historical record of solar events and space weather phenomena on an animated vertical timelien

How We Built It

🌞 Solar Flares and CMEs

We used the NASA DONKI API with the FLR (Flare) endpoint to fetch detailed solar flare data, including class (C, M, X), peak time, and solar source location and using the CME endpoint we fetched CME info regarding their start time, source location, and directional analyses (speed, angle).

🧭 Aurora Forecast Page

We combined CME data with the NOAA Kp Index Forecast API, which gives planetary Kp values. These values were used to generate auroral ovals at varying latitudes, simulating where auroras might be visible.

🛰 Timeline & Risk Dashboard

The DONKI API’s FLR, CME, GST (Geomagnetic Storms), and HSS (High-Speed Stream) endpoints helped power a chronological activity timeline.

🗞 News Section

For real-time news aggregation, we used Spaceflight News API , NASA RSS Feed , ESA RSS Feed

3D Rendering: react‑globe.gl (Three.js under the hood) handles globe, custom layers, heatmaps and point rings.
Data Fetching: Axios + custom hooks.

Challenges We Ran Into

Heliographic to Earth Coordinates: Parsing “N15W20” strings into lat/long required careful regex and solar‑geometry math.
WebGL Bind Errors: Learned to guard against empty heatmap datasets to avoid GPU binding failures.
Bandwidth Calibration: Finding the sweet spot (2–5°) so hotspots are visible without washing out regional detail.

Accomplishments We’re Proud Of

A seamless 3D heatmap that reveals persistent solar‑activity hotspots.
Dynamic auroral rings that animate with live Kp forecasts.
A modular architecture that can easily ingest new DONKI feeds (e.g., SEPs, radio‑blackout forecasts).

What We Learned

How to blend React’s declarative model with imperative Three.js updates.
The art of kernel density estimation for geospatial event data.
Designing intuitive UI controls for complex, time‑varying scientific datasets.

What’s Next for Icarus

WebSocket integration for real‑time alert pushes.
- Pulse animations for flare and CME “shockwaves.”
Mobile‑optimized views with touch‑friendly globe interaction.
Additional data layers: solar wind, SEPs, and live magnetometer readings.