Project Erebus is an epic children's adventure taking its inspiration from the 1839 Ross Expedition - the last, and greatest, polar expedition ever undertaken by sail. Two adventurous brothers, Ollie and Harry, have set out to send scaled replicas of HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to drift through the Southern Ocean following the circumpolar current around the coastline of Antarctica, a journey of over 20,000 km.
Icoteq have designed bespoke tracking and monitoring devices for this project that use the ARGOS satellite network to report back the location of each boat with scientific data collected along the journey. This includes air temperature, ocean temperature and ocean pH - key markers for climate change. Once a month each device will also take a photograph from the deck of the boat and upload it to our server to give an idea of the conditions at the boat location.
A commemoration to the original expedition, this project brings together the involvement of children in science, technology and engineering subjects (STEM), the application of low cost sensors for environmental monitoring and the notion of citizen science contributing to the gathering of important scientific data at scale.
Follow the journey of Terror and Erebus at https://icoteq.com/project-erebus, click on the waypoints for images and sensor data, and join the discussion at https://www.facebook.com/tdajp!
We've decided to open source our 3D mapping rendering and provide access to our data so that the community may contribute and improve upon the baseline mapping. If you have any comments/suggests raise a CR or otherwise feel free to submit a PR with your own improvements!
The 3D mapping in the file static/scripts/main.js uses Cesium Ion @ http://cesium.com. This is a platform for 3D geospatial mapping with an extensive set of features and rich API. This repo allows you to deploy a sandbox docker container that runs a webserver and our baseline 3d mapping software built upon Cesium Ion.
The code is fairly straightforwards provided you know a bit of javascript. Be sure to get your own Cesium ion account and API key if you plan to make changes and put your own access token into the following line of code:
Cesium.Ion.defaultAccessToken = 'your_access_token';
Run the following commands:
docker-compose build
docker-compose up -d
Then point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:5000 or the machine IP address which is running the docker on your network.
A snapshot of the real-world data used can be found under the static/geojson and static/images subdirectories.
You can also fetch the most recent data set (which is updated aperiodically, subject to satellite passovers) from the following URL:
https://icoteq.egnyte.com/dl/XaN8yCHsqr
Click the download link and unzip the downloaded zip file in your working repo directory and it will update your data set. You will need to refresh your browser window to see the updates take effect.