InteR'planetary

Tracks: 1st/2nd/3rd Overall, Best UI/UX, Most on Theme

Inspiration

The idea for InteR'planetary came from our fascination with space exploration and the possibility of discovering new planets that could sustain human life. Since the theme of CutieHack was space, we wanted to create an interactive tool that allows people to visualize and understand the factors that make a planet habitable.

What it does

InteR'planetary is a web application that allows users to create their own planets by adjusting parameters like mass, radius, distance from a star, and more. Once the user inputs the parameters, the application calculates a habitability score for the planet. This score is based on various scientific principles such as planet's mass, radius, dimensions of the sun it is orbiting around (including solar luminosity and effective temperature) and more. This gives users an interactive experience to understand what might make a planet suitable for human life.

How we built it

We built our web app using React and Three.js. Our backend implementation was done using python, and integrated using Flask. We referenced the Statistic-Likelihood Exo-planetary Habitability Index (SEPHI) (Rodríguez-Mozos et al. 2017) and Habitable Zones Around Main-Sequence Stars: New Estimates (Kopparapu et al. 2013) for the math behind the habitability index.

Challenges we ran into

Due to the complex nature of planet habitability, we ran into trouble finding the data required to train a model on truly habitable planets. To solve this issue, we opted for a statistical likelihood based approach that uses various planetary features to determine the probability of habitability.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we successfully built an interactive and visually appealing tool that teaches users about space science. It is also a pretty fun game. We're also proud of the accuracy of the calculations and how they align with real-world scientific principles according to the docs above.

What we learned

We got really good experience making a full-stack application, which none of us have done before. We also got to be exposed to some 3js for modeling the planets, and some really fascinating math in calculating the planet habitability.