Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
141 lines (94 loc) · 5.1 KB

numfocus-sdg-2023-r1.md

File metadata and controls

141 lines (94 loc) · 5.1 KB
Raw

The NumFOCUS small development grants program

1 - Name of the submitter

Jorge Martínez Garrido

2 - E-mail direction

contact@jorgemartinez.space

3 - Nature of the software

Affiliated -> Other -> poliastro

4 - Proposal title

Enhancing the visualization capabilities of poliastro

5 - Two-sentence summary

Implement a powerful and customizable visualization backend based on PyVista and provide plotting animation capabilities to poliastro.

6 - Description of the proposal

poliastro is an open source (MIT) pure Python library for interactive Astrodynamics and Orbital Mechanics, with a focus on ease of use, speed, and quick visualization. It provides a simple and intuitive API, and handles physical quantities with units.

Visualizing astronomical objects together with their path and motion is a key feature of any Astrodynamics library, including poliastro.

At the moment, poliastro supports two backends built on top of the Matplotlib library and the Plotly library. Although these libraries provide support for three-dimensional visualization, their capabilities are limitied. For example, texturing or lightning are not supported.

A solution proposed during the SciPy 2022 conference was to create a new backend based on PyVista. This library provides a Pythonic high-level API to The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) library.

Cesium was also considered for precise visualization. However, this software only supports the Earth as the main attractor. The reason is that Cesium focuses on geospatial activities. In addition, Cesium requires from a web interface or Jupyter notebook whereas PyVista can also be executed locally in a dedicated window, alleviating the number of dependencies. PyVista also integrates with various graphic user interfaces frameworks such us PyQT and PySide.

Another desired feature in poliastro is animated plots. This feature becomes essential when simulating the evolution of a system. With animated plots, users would be able to have better understanding on how the system evolves over time.

This last feature is supported by Matplotlib, Plotly and the new proposed PyVista backends.

7 - Benefit to project and community

The coding sprints that took place at SciPy 2022 conference turned out to be an excellent place to discuss with PyVista maintainers about using their library as a new plotting backend for poliastro.

This proposal can generate the following benefits to the project and the community:

  • Users can generate and customize powerful and accurate visualizations and animations of their simulations using poliastro. This would bring poliastro a new

  • poliastro would still remain as a pure Python, as PyVista is a high-level Python wrapper of VTK. No need for maintainers and contributors to learn other programming languages or complex graphics APIs. Everything is implemented using Python.

  • Generic features can be implemented upstreamed to PyVista so their users can benefit without requiring to install poliastro.

  • Since PyVista is an affiliated NumFOCUS project, all the community can benefit from the grant in one way or another.

  • The testing of the new backend can be performed using the pytest-pyvista plugin for pytest. The adoption of this plugin in poliastro can generate useful feedback for enhancing the plugin.

All the proposed features would allow poliastro to be closer to commercial software while still remaining open-source and a reference project in the Python scientific community.

8 - Amount requested

Total amount requested: 4500$

9 - Budget justification

The project, as depicted in the "Timeline" section of this proposal, is expected to be completed within the course of 5 months. Starting date would be May 2023 and the project would be completed by the end of September 2023.

The grant is used as hourly rates and number of work hours for contractors. The requested budget is justified as follows:

4500$ = 5 [month] * 15 [day / month] * 3 [hour / day] * 20.00 [$ / hour]

10 - Timeline of deliverable

  • The first month is devoted to implement the PyVista backend. The new backend must support Solar System textured bodies and loading of custom object models within the graphics scene. Tests for the new backend are required too.

  • The second month and third month focus on the implementation of plotting animations. This is expected to be a more intensive workload, as it requires implementing this feature across three different backends, each one with its own architecture.

  • With the new features, the next month is used to implement miscellaneous PyVista backend features and utilities like visualization of celestial frames, planes of reference and the celestial sphere containing an accurate representation of far stars.

  • The last month is used in case some difficulties arise during the implementation of any of the previously proposed features.