ISS Temporal Groundtrack
A prototype that displays the current location of the International Space Station (ISS) on a Mapbox map and continuously updates it.
Built to be stood up quickly under VSCode using Node.
The spacetrack_iss folder contains a simple PHP space-track.org API caching scheme. This app hits the API for ISS TLE ephemeris JSON objects for a given day and caches the response. This is decoupled from the rest of the code in this repo. Run it in an environment of your choice that has PHP curl capability. Put the location URL into the index.js file.
TLE data is processed using tle.js library into orbital data including latitude and longitude. This data is fed into mapbox-gl on an interval to update the ISS position every 100th of a second, and recenter the map every 5 seconds.
Accounts Needed for External APIs
Mapbox
Mapbox is the service that provides the map itself upon which the ISS groundtrack position is indicated.
Get your MapBox API key and create asrc/credentials.js file with one line in it:
mapboxCredentials = "<mapboxkey>";Space-Track
Space-Track provides us with orbital ephemeris data that allows us to calculate the current position of the ISS very accurately.
Get your Space-track user account and create a spacetrack_iss/credentials.php file with two lines in it:
<? php
`$credentials = 'identity=<username>&password=<password>';Environment
Install
$ npm install
Run
$ npm run dev
Access via http://localhost:3000/
Build
$ npm run build
Copy contents of /dist folder to external server