Project Details

The Challenge | Orbital Scrap Metal — The Video Game

Nuts, bolts, spent rocket stages, and broken pieces of satellites orbiting Earth are just a few of the many thousands of items known as orbital debris, or space junk. Your challenge is to create an orbital debris collection videogame web-app! You may build upon NASA’s Spacebirds and real data.

SCRAPIT

SCRAPIT is an incredible mini-game, which idea is to show people the problem of space garbage. Here you can find out, what methods are used to fight with scraps and why this problem is so important through nice visualisation.

Boltzmann brain

We are 6 student, studying in UCU. We are really worried about world problems, like space garbage. Unfortunately most people even don't know about this problem. That's why we decided to make game, so that people can be really introduced in this problem.

First of all, when we skimmed through the scrap metal data provided by NASA, we realized how much scrap there actually is out there! That was unexpected.
The second insight that we came upon was how complicated their actual movement is and how many calculations need to be taken into account. When we tried to implement their orbital movements, the calculations yielded were imprecise because of floating point arithmetic. That's why we decided to use less physics in game, but make it more attractive.