Project Background:

I spent five amazing years at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory being inspired by many of my team-mates who were a handful of the greatest minds of remote sensing and camera software. I had many amazing mentors along the way, many of whose work (too many to mention in this already wordy doc) I owe my entire career to.

Fast forward to Summer-2017. I was 3 years gone from NASA taking on the next big data challenges of my career and I got a call out of the blue from some old friends to help out with a long-shot project. It was very ambitious/lofty goal but a great way for me to help give thanks to a mission and team who I owed so much to: Cassini. You see, Cassini was set to burn up by plan in Saturn's atmosphere in the Fall of 2017. I wanted to show just how far I could take some simple Cassini science data in the most abstract manner possible and create something beautiful for the public people to celebrate the mission.

Long story short: I pulled off scraping about 1M (one million) datapoints into some rings that dance in realtime driven by frequency analysis coming in live from SoundCloud!!?. For me, this was some GPU magic. I normally visualize millions and millions of datapoints on a GPU per my day-to-day work, but animating at mass as fast-as-possible based on a ton of bins of streaming sound data, (with analysis being performed in the browser too) seemed like a fun challenge.

Why you didn't see this last fall when Cassini burnt up? Unfortunately 3 years out of government circles was long enough to forget just how painfully slow doing anything out-of-the-ordinary is, let alone anything for the general public and all the requirements that has attached. Political fights happened, we fought hard but the thing got left in the dust sadly.

Which leaves us to now (Nov 2018). I feel bad every time I see this project gathering dust in my private repos and needed to share it. I won't let this one be a ghost in the closet of ghosts of prototypes/sketches that never saw the light of day.

Special Thanks to every one of the humans and robots at JPL for all the tireless work they do and all of the knowledge and inspiration they bestowed to me get me on the path I am on today. Walking away was painful, yet necessary for my adventure and I still tear-up every time I hear Elton John's Rocket Man to this very day.

Very Special Thanks to Flying Lotus for creating the default tracks wired into this art. Not only does it sound amazing, it looks pretty amazing too. The whole spectrum analyser is full of great sound as you can clearly see.

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To Launch:

1. cd into the repo dir
2. bower install (if you dont have bower, npm install -g bower)
3. python -m SimpleHTTPServer
4. then visit http://localhost:8000

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