SoCiS/2012/Ideas

See also: SOCIS Instructions

Guidelines for ESA Summer of Code in Space

Information for Students

These ideas were contributed by our developers and users. They are sometimes vague or incomplete. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the developers and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at.

Being accepted as a ESA Summer of Code in Space 2012 (ESA SoCiS) student is quite competitive. Students are supposed to thoroughly research the technologies of their proposed project. Also they are supposed to be in contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.

When writing your proposal or asking for help from the general KDE community don't assume people are familiar with the ideas here. KDE is really big!

If there is no specific contact given you can ask questions on the KDE EDU list [email protected] or on the general KDE development list [email protected]. See the KDE mailing lists page for information on available mailing lists and how to subscribe.

Adding a Proposal

Note

Follow the template of other proposals!

Project:

Brief explanation:

Expected results:

Knowledge Prerequisite:

Mentor:

When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:

• if the application is not widely known, a description of what it does and where its code lives
• a brief explanation
• the expected results
• pre-requisites for working on your project
• if applicable, links to more information or discussions
• mailing list or IRC channel for your application/library/module
• your name and email address for contact (if you're willing to be a mentor)

If you are not a developer but have a good idea for a proposal, get in contact with relevant developers first.

Ideas

How to find ideas? Obvious sources of projects are the bugs database, the forum, and your list and IRC channel ideas.

Marble Virtual Globe

Marble is a Virtual Globe based on Qt technology and is a part of the KDE Edu Suite (http://edu.kde.org). The Marble webpage is at http://edu.kde.org/marble and the developers' mailing list is at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/marble-devel.

Project: Marble: To Mars and Venus - Planetary Satellite Plugin in Marble

Brief explanation: During ESA SoCiS 2011 Guillaume Martres developed a Satellite plugin that can visualize the satellite orbits around our earth. Meanwhile Gerhard Holtkamp has created some code for Marble that can be used to calculate orbits of satellites / space probes around Venus, Mars and the Moon. This code needs to be converted into a plugin and needs to be extended to provide a nice visualization.

Marble already provides several Map Themes of other planets and moons including Photographic, Topographic and Historic Planet maps. See the bottom half of this page:

http://edu.kde.org/marble/maps-4.5.php

The aim of this project is to have Marble visualize orbits such as the ones of Venus Express , Mars Express, Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This should be implemented as a plugin for Marble which the user can configure up to his needs - either via a configuration dialog or interactively via a mouseclick or via a dedicated control. It should be possible to view the position of the probes for any point of time and gather the flight data. If there is still time the map themes for each planet can be improved (e.g. by adding more data, KML files of lander missions, Panoramic images etc.). Also the existing plugin that covers the Earth's satellites might be improved as needed.

Expected results: Planetary Satellite / Space Probe positions in Marble get displayed nicely for other planets (Venus, Mars, Moon). Orbits are displayed. For some probes a dedicated icon is shown.

Knowledge Prerequisite: A good grasp over C++ and object-oriented programming, and Qt; writing test cases with Qt; should quickly learn how to write libraries; have a lot of patience; ability to solve software design problems.

Math skills are needed, familiarity with celestial mechanics is a plus!

Mentor: Torsten Rahn <rahn AT kde DOT org>, Gerhard Holtkamp

Contact

• IRC channel: #marble on Freenode
• Mailinglist: [email protected] See http://kde.org/mailinglists/ for details
• Website: http://edu.kde.org/marble

Project: Displaying Solar / Lunar Eclipses in Marble

Brief explanation: This project is about displaying Solar and Lunar Eclipses in Marble. Gerhard Holtkamp has donated some code to the Marble Project to calculate the occurance and the appearance of eclipses. The goal of this project is to create a plugin for Marble that allows to provide a nice informative visualization of solar eclipses and lunar eclipses inside Marble. Especially in combination with Marble's other features (OpenStreetMap etc.) this provides a powerful tool for the casual user and astronomer as well as for the eclipsophile enthusiast who wants to plan a journey to a certain solar eclipse.

Expected results: Marble automatically informs the user about an eclipse that is soon to happen via a dialog, Visualization of eclipse paths (umbra / penumbra), User can search for eclipses and different eclipse types (partial/total lunar, partial/annular/total solar) inside Marble, Marble can visualize eclipses and prepare trips to a solar eclipse.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++. Familiarity with Qt will help.

Mentor: Torsten Rahn <rahn AT kde DOT org> , Gerhard Holtkamp

Contact

• IRC channel: #marble on Freenode
• Mailinglist: [email protected] See http://kde.org/mailinglists/ for details
• Website: http://edu.kde.org/marble