You Are My Sunshine - ICARUS PROJECT

Entry into the NASA Space Apps Challenge Hackathon (October 2nd 2021)

Table of Contents

• Summary
• Background
• Objectives
• Potential Considerations
• Technologies and our Approach
• DEMO
• Team Members

Summary

NASA produces a variety of surface solar and meteorological data parameters that are useful to commercial renewable energy and sustainable building ventures, but this information is not easily accessible to the typical homeowner. Your challenge is to develop a mobile application to access the information on NASA’s Prediction of Worldwide renewable Energy Resources (POWER) web services portal and provide useful information about sunshine to the general public.

Background

Solar energy is more widespread in some countries than others, and it is the fastest growing and most affordable source of new electricity in the United States according to the U.S. Department of Energy (https://www.energy.gov/solar).
NASA produces a variety of surface solar and meteorological data parameters that are useful to commercial renewable energy and sustainable building ventures. Parameters key to siting, sizing, and monitoring these technologies are available via NASA's Prediction of Worldwide renewable Energy Resources (POWER) web services portal.
These parameters are developed by NASA Earth observation analysis and modeling efforts undertaken by organizations such as the Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) project and the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. However, the POWER web site is not streamlined or simplified for use by the general public due to the vast number of parameters, time averages, and statistical reports available.

Objectives

Your challenge is to develop a mobile application that accesses the information available via the NASA POWER web services portal and provides useful data associated with sunshine to the general public in an accessible manner.

Given a user's location (or a user-specified location), your application should provide a graphical display depicting the time series of the weekly average "available sunshine" (i.e., solar irradiance) for the past year. Your application should also allow the user to change these parameters (e.g., the temporal resolution, time period) to obtain more specialized results. The results should be displayed via clearly labeled graphs, with time on one axis and available sunshine on the other axis.

Your application should be made available to the public using a secure online distribution mechanism typically used for the mobile application platform. Your application should be made available on a variety of mobile device types (i.e., android, iPhone, windows phone).

Potential Considerations

As you develop your app, you may (but are not required to) consider the following:

1. You could design the app for specific use cases. For example, the user may be a homeowner who: a) is interested in seeking historical data to enable more informed solar panel purchasing decisions, or b) wants to monitor the electrical output of the home’s current system relative to satellite-based estimates of sunshine (or solar irradiance) reaching the home’s location.

2. You could make the application expandable by adding user-defined buttons to display specific POWER parameters upon request (i.e., temperature, humidity, wind, etc.).

3. You could allow integration of the user's own measurements to supplement or to compare with the NASA parameters.

Technologies and our Approach

React Native Cross Platform Mobile Application Development, using Expo for deployment.

Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06NXWdsHpOM&ab_channel=JackHanlon

Team Members

Jack Hanlon, B.Sc. Physics & Computer Science

Thomas Genet, B.Sc. Physics