Portal for NASA's New Horizons Scientists

NASA

Early rendering of the New Horizons probe approaching Charon

Areas of Expertise:

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CHALLENGE

We had the honor to participate in NASA’s New Horizons project whose probe flew by Pluto in 2015.

When we came into the project, the data collected by the probe and sent to the scientists was in the form of a gigantic spreadsheet. It had so many rows and columns of data that it was really difficult to make any sense of the information.

Implementation Details

First, we migrated the existing Zope application to the Plone CMS so as to benefit from a large set of secure content management capabilities out of the box.

Then we worked on improving the usability of the portal used by the NASA scientists so as to present key information in a concise manner.

We also added the ability to create on-the-fly graphs of various data points using D3 and Rickshaw for ad-hoc graphing.

On the back-end, we used Zope3 and SQLAlchemy to integrate with the relational database.

RESULTS

The dashboard was completed on time, a few months prior to the probe's flyby. Overall, this was a fantastic project for the Sixies to work on and we are grateful for the opportunity to contribute to space exploration.