NASA Space Explorer

NASA publishes some genuinely mind-bending datasets for free. Near-Earth asteroid trajectories, every recorded flyby of our planet, stellar classifications going back decades — all of it is public, all of it is downloadable, and most of it sits unread in CSV files.

This project turns three of those datasets into something you can actually explore. No coding knowledge required to use it — just Docker, a browser, and a passing interest in what's out there.

What's inside

The app is split into four sections, each accessible from the sidebar:

Asteroids — 2,000 near-Earth objects tracked by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Browse dashboards showing size distribution, orbit types, and hazard classifications, or jump into the 3D orbital map to see them plotted around the Sun with Earth and Mars for scale.

NEO Close Approaches — 90,836 recorded close approach events: every time a near-Earth object has passed, or is projected to pass, within a meaningful distance of our planet. Filter by date, speed, miss distance, or hazard status. A composite danger score ranks the most notable events.

Stars — 240 classified stars spanning six types, from brown dwarfs to hypergiants. The centrepiece is the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram — the most important chart in stellar astronomy — plotting every star's temperature against its luminosity and revealing the entire lifecycle of stars in one view.

AI Chat — a chat interface running Llama 3.2 locally via Ollama. The model has been briefed on all three datasets and can answer questions in plain English. Nothing leaves your machine.

Getting started

You need Docker Desktop and Ollama installed. Then:

# Pull the AI model (one-time, ~2 GB)
ollama pull llama3.2
 
# In a separate terminal, start Ollama
ollama serve
 
# Clone and run the app
git clone https://github.com/KJH91/nasa_information.git
cd nasa_information
docker compose up --build

Open http://localhost:8501 in your browser once the build completes.

Data sources

| Dataset | Source | Records | |---|---|---| | Near-Earth Asteroids | NASA JPL Small Body Database | 2,000 | | Close Approach Events | NASA NeoWs API | 90,836 | | Stellar Classification | Stellar Classification Dataset | 240 |