SpaceMine

Your guide to asteroid mining!

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Inspiration

One of the biggest rising resource industries to soon dominate the scene is asteroid mining. Some specialists speculate we are only a few decades away from starting to mine our first ones. The problem is though, not all asteroids contain valuable metals or water, some of them are just piles of rubble held together by microgravity. This is where our platform comes in. Our website will help asteroid miners figure out which space rocks to mine and how difficult it will be. We came to this idea by simply doing a brainstorming session. We were trying to figure out a problem that isn't obvious, but that could be highly relevant in the future. The provided solution

What it does

Our platform will show the nearest asteroids to Earth on a map. The users will be able to click on each asteroid and see its distance from Earth, where it's heading, what it might have in it and what its approximate value is. Our app will be like a platform to anyone interested in asteroid mining or doing research on the topic. It will also have a search engine, so for instance, if I want to mine gold, our website would provide the user with the most profitable candidates.

How we built it

We structured the website using react and used Asterank API to collect data on near-Earth asteroids. Asterank relies on NASA's database for asteroids. We analyzed Asterank to determine the composition of asteroids based on their types. Using our results, we derived a set of queries to extract the best asteroids for each natural resource.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges was the workload that needed to be put in the project. Our coders worked hard, by that I mean over 12 hours per hackathon day, sometimes even during the night. Another challenge was finding data on the asteroids and APIs and frameworks with which we could create this project since there aren't many websites or programs out there with a similar functionality

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy that we coded a functional website that uses API's and represents the data in a visual and user-friendly manner.

What we learned

The developers improved their skills in Vue.js, two of them learned the framework from scratch. They also learned the query syntax of MongoDB. During this hackathon, all of us improved our communication and teamwork skills collaborating in a multicultural work environment.

What's next for SpaceMine

With SpaceMine the sky is the limit. We plan on implementing a space research and mining investment opportunity where we would open up this complex topic to the general public. We aim for SpaceMine to become the go-to site for analyzing asteroid data once the industry takes off. When the technology start advancing far enough to support interstellar travel, we want to start adding planets and stars to our database and their approximate value. Slack Channel: #spacemine

NOTE

If you experience problems with the website, make sure to zoom out to see the whole page. If you are visiting the project on laptop or tablet, you might have to zoom out to 75% or 50%.

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