ARCADE

The Advanced Research Collaboration and Application Development Environment (ARCADE) is a collaboration project between the ASTRIA Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin, the IBM Space Tech team, and other partners. The goal of this repository is to provide a unified and coherent API for accessing, analyzing, and extending a diverse set of derived data points concerning an anthropogenic space object (ASO). Note: this repository currently represents a small proof of concept and is in a very alpha state of development, so APIs (internal and external) may change greatly.

API Accounts

Accessing the ARCADE API requires an account and registering for one can be done through the API like so:

curl -X 'POST' \
  'https://arcade.spacetech-ibm.com/auth/register' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{ \
  "email": "<EMAIL ADDRESS>", \
  "password": "<PASSWORD>" \
}'

(If you copy this into a shell script, you may need to join the lines to avoid server rejection. Likewise below.)

The ARCADE API endpoints are secured via JSON Web Tokens (JWT).

curl -X 'POST' \
  'https://arcade.spacetech-ibm.com/auth/jwt/login' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  -d 'username=<EMAIL ADDRESS>&password=<PASSWORD>'

which results in the response

{
  "access_token": "<JSON WEB TOKEN>",
  "token_type": "bearer"
}

API

Interactive swagger documentation for the API where you can try it out in a web browser is available here. The currently provided endpoints that you can programmatically test via the base URI https://arcade.spacetech-ibm.com are:

Endpoint	Description
/asos	Returns basic information on all the ASOs that ARCADE knows about like its name and various identifiers
/aso	Returns the basic information for a single ASO
/ephemeris	Provides the most up-to-date ephemeris data for an ASO
/interpolate	Uses UT’s orbdetpy library to interpolate the ephemeris data for the ASO to the specified temporal frequency
/compliance	Reports whether the ASO is compliant with the United Nation’s requirements for object registration

Architecture

The ARCADE platform ingests data from multiple raw and preprocessed sources including telescopes, radar arrays, and TLE data from different providers and fuses it into a coherent view of each ASO. This data fusion is done in ASTRIAGraph with the data being stored in the graph database or IBM’s cloud object storage (COS) depending on the data type. A RESTful API is then used to provide access to this rich data to developers and client applications.

Demo Client Applications

Conjunction Search

The conjunction search demo of the space situational awareness project now uses the /ephemeris ARCADE API endpoint to gather the up-to-date orbit state vector data and then determine the nearest conjunctions of each satellite.

Observatory Light Pollution

Daniel Kucharski of the University of Texas at Austin has developed a C++ library for determining how much light pollution a terrestrial based astronomical observatory will experience over a given time period due to ASOs passing overhead. This demo utilizes ARCADE’s /interpolate endpoint and the satellite light pollution library to show the brightness of ASOs currently above the New Mexico skys. Redder objects are brighter while bluer objects are more dim.

UNOSSA Compliance

In this demo we combine ASTRIAGraph and the \compliance ARCADE endpoint to show what ASOs are in compliance with UNOSSA’s registration requirements.

Contributing

We very much encourage anyone and everyone to join and contribute to this project. Please see the contributing file for more details.