!!Con 2017: Where Are All the Space Robots?! by Lisa Ballard
7Where Are All the Space Robots?! by Lisa Ballard
Earthlings are currently communicating with over 30 space probes that have escaped Earth’s orbit and set off into our solar system and beyond. These probes have origins from countries all over the world, and several are international collaborations. They conduct a wide variety of science experiments and take a lot of amazing pictures, but getting information about them can be tricky. Several space agencies detail their own missions to varying degrees around the web, but outside of Wikipedia, there was not a single website that described all the current active robots humans are currently communicating with, so we decided to build it! We wanted to create a website that was both beautiful to use and provided up-to-the-minute information about Earth’s robotic ambassadors. I’ll demo the site, talk about the technology we used to produce it, and show how we use some Python tools and an undocumented online data feed from NASA’s Deep Space Network to display near-real-time information about each probe.