mkalte666 / satwatch

Satwatch

A 3D Solar System Visualisation written in Rust

About Satwatch

This project is created with the following goals in mind

• Get a better understanding about Rust as a language. Aka: Learn Rust better.
• Learn more about the way Positioning is handled in Professional space applications.
• Create a tool to look at current and past missions, just for the fun of it.
• Talking about fun: FUN!

Installation

At some point there will be prebuilt binaries, but as of know, need to build this yourself.

• Clone the repository and its submodules. git clone [email protected]:mkalte666/satwatch --recursive
• optional: build it with cargo: cargo build --release
• Run it with cargo cargo run --release

You will need a c and c++ compiler installed for some dependencies to build correctly.

TODO

The todo, until this gets close to something resembling a release,is rather big. This is not exhaustive, but for a "1.0" these are the features to go for

Earth satellites

• SGP4 based TLE propagation
• UI and drawing improvements for the ui related to this

Directly SPICE related

• NASA-SPICE in the build
• SPICE-Based Time
• SPICE-Based (using PDS Data) Planet positions
• Arbitrary spice objects
• An integrated downloader for NASA PDS Data
• Correct rotations of all planets (and maybe the sun, if its texture is good enough)

Other functionality

• Observation(aka passes) finder from
• Lat/Long/Altitude coordinates
• Planets are not spheres
• Textures for all panets and the sun
• Switch between the normal equator-based camera and one that has its plane on the ecliptic
• More consistent UI. Probably best tackled somewhere in between "nearly everything is prototyped" and "too late to fix the current state"
• Some sort of welcome-screen that takes care of the initial requred downloads (Planetary ephemeris and leap second kernel)

More basic stuff

• UV-Mapped Textures for objects
• Some form of view-frustrum culling, maybe, if needed on weaker machines. I doubt it, needs testing.
• Orbit camera instead of the FPS one currently implemented. Would then probably play better with the euler singularities as well. Were not a spaceship :(

Not directly code related

• Some cool screenshots for this readme
• CI builds
• Write a blog post or talk when this is finished, explaning the whole thing.
• Same as above, but for people touching the code: Documentation.