ActiveSAT

ActiveSAT is a creative data visualization project that helps the user understand the number of active satellites that are currently orbiting Earth. ActiveSAT is built to be simple and intuitive. With only a few moves of the mouse, users can start to recognize some of the aspects of the visualization. When an object (satellite) is hovered over, the object will freeze its motion and display information about the craft in the information box. The color of each craft corresponds to the country the satellite belongs to, while the radius of the object is determined based on the launch mass. Users can filter the satellites by country, purpose, and orbit.

This was a semester long project for Matthew Bethancourt's "Studio: Space" course. The course challenged students to take a creative look at space and the data concerning it. The goal of the class was to work towards a large scale interactive piece that would be displayed in an interactive expo. I continue to tweek and update this project periodically as updates are made to the data set by the Union of Concerned Scientists. This project also is the basis of another portfolio piece of mine, ActiveSAT360.

General Information: 

Colors

Blue - United States of America 
Red -  Russia 
Yellow - China 
Orange - Japan 
Cyan - Multinational 
Purple - United Kingom 
Pink - Canada 
Grey - ESA 
White - Other