NASA collects positional and velocity data for the ISS, and made it publicly available through their website. For this application, I used the Orbital Ephemeris Message (OEM) data that contains ISS state vectors over an approximately 15 day period. The data contains header, metadata, a listing of upcoming ISS translation maneuvers, and state vectors containing positional and velocity data for each epoch.

Since the data is released in the form of XML and TXT files, it is challenging to sift through it manually. Hence, I created Surf Wax ISS, a containerized Flask application for querying and returning information from the ISS data set. The output data has been reformatted to make it easier for the user to understand.

The application has 13 routes that conform to the RESTful architecture. Some of the usage includes returning epochs data, ISS speed calculation, current location of the ISS, and many more. I have also made the app more portable by containerizing it using Docker, and utilized Docker Compose to automate deployment.