Mission to Mars

This is a small a web application that scrapes various websites for data related to the planet Mars and displays the information in a single HTML page.

Web Scraping

Scraped using Jupyter Notebook, BeautifulSoup, Pandas, and Requests/Splinter.

NASA Mars News

• Scrape the NASA Mars News Site and collect the latest News Title and Paragraph Text.

JPL Mars Space Images - Featured Image

• Scraped the JPL Featured Space Image from here.

• Made sure to find the image url to the full size .jpg image.

# Example:
featured_image_url = 'https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/images/largesize/PIA16225_hires.jpg'

Mars Weather

• Using the Mars Weather twitter account here , scraped the latest Mars weather tweet from the page.

# Example:
mars_weather = 'Sol 1801 (Aug 30, 2017), Sunny, high -21C/-5F, low -80C/-112F, pressure at 8.82 hPa, daylight 06:09-17:55'

Mars Facts

• From the Mars Facts webpage here, used Pandas to scrape the table containing facts about the planet including Diameter, Mass, etc.

• Converted the data to a HTML table string.

Mars Hemispheres

• Scraped the high resolution images for each of Mar's hemispheres from thebUSGS Astrogeology site here.

• Assigned each image url string and hemisphere title to a dictionary and appended each dict. to a list.

# Example:
hemisphere_image_urls = [
    {"title": "Valles Marineris Hemisphere", "img_url": "..."},
    {"title": "Cerberus Hemisphere", "img_url": "..."},
    {"title": "Schiaparelli Hemisphere", "img_url": "..."},
    {"title": "Syrtis Major Hemisphere", "img_url": "..."},
]

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MongoDB and Flask Application

Created a HTML page with FLASK template to display all of the Mars information which I stored in a MongoDB.

• Converted the Jupyter notebook into a Python script called scrape_mars.py with a function called scrape that will execute all of the scraping code and return a Python dictionary containing all of the data.

• Made a route called /scrape to import the scrape_mars.py script and call the scrape function.

  • Returns value in Mongo as a Python dictionary.

• Root route / queries Mongo db then passes data into an HTML template for displaying.

• Createdindex.html to take the mars data dictionary and display all of the data in the appropriate HTML elements.

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Designed by Michael Patterson