Requirements

It's postulated the world will run out of natural resources by 2080. Asteroids have a lot of precious metals we need, and mining them could be a viable option. Currently, they cost too much to get at them. BUT, if we invested now in research, the cost would go down, and the asteroid value would go up. A research report was done that corroborates this with the mineral make up and projected value of asteroids based on the samples we have on earth. An example of this is the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada. Deemed too expensive and messy to extract, as soon as the price of oil climbed up, by 2003 it suddenly become profitable despite the horrible political, environmental, and human impacts. If there is profit, no challenge is too large.

A website was created by Ian Webster, called Asterank.com, that pulls real-time information from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, static statistics, and various NASA satellite's. Combined together, it then calculates how much each asteroid we know about is worth. This means, how much would it cost to get to the asteroid and then mine and process the minerals, how much would you make on selling the minerals, then minus what it cost and that is your profit.

We're going to be simplifying and mocking his code, and shortening the amount of steps a bit to simplify it. His original code also hits a satellite, Kepler, that ran out of fuel so it no longer produces near earth object (NEO) data, but there are new ones with API's, specifically TESS.

Goal: Read satellite and propulsion data, combine to get a list of asteroids with their monetary value, then load into a database. This database will allow us to build an API to query it, and then a UI to utilize the API to visualize it.