A young, amateur astronomer is stargazing in her garden. The night is clear enough and she is far enough away from light pollution that she can see many stars. Some she knows, many she doesn’t. But she notices one star that is slowly moving across the sky. It isn’t a plane – it’s just a pinprick of light – and it’s unlikely to be aliens. What our astronomer has just spotted is a satellite – one of hundreds of thousands orbiting our planet for weather monitoring, communications and scientific purposes. Using existing services, she could trawl through lists and maps to work out exactly which of the drifters had graced her sky that night. But imagine if she could simply hold up the camera on her mobile phone and fulfil her curiosity in an instant. She could find out that it’s actually IceSat-2, a NASA mission launched last year to monitor the changing environment. She could read about the instruments on board, the observations it beams back to Earth and how they’re being used by scientists all over the world. She could even read about the original ICESat mission from more than 10 years ago. She can see that next month, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory will be passing her. Wait, what’s an X-Ray?

We’ve all been there. Down that familiar research rabbit hole late at night. She’s hooked on space.

Satellite Explorer is a satellite tracking application designed to connect ordinary observers to the real science conducted by NASA on missions orbiting overhead. To capture our users' imaginations, our application uses Unity to create an interactive augmented reality experience for mobile devices that populates the environment around you with satellites tracked live using data from NASA APIs. This allows users to see a 3-D model representing the satellite at its real-time location in the sky.

We also created a website to visualise the orbits of NASA satellites around the world on a globe so users can understand the vast scale of satellite science. Users can query further information about any of the satellites, including when they were launched and what kind of science they conduct as well as linking to additional reading via news APIs and NASA’s Goddard Flight Center website. We want this to send users on journeys through online resources to spark those important scientific inspirations in fields from computing, to ecology, to engineering and physics.

Our hope is that this can inspire the prospective space scientists, engineers and data analysts of the future with a starting point on their journey to explore our world, from 2000 kilometres above.