README.md

In Liu-Zhichao/nasaR: Interface to Various NASA APIs

nasaR

The goal of nasaR is to provide useful functions to help access NASA data easily.

Installation

1. You can install the released version of nasaR from github with:

devtools::install_github("Liu-Zhichao/nasaR")
# If you want to read the vignettes of the package by:
browseVignettes("nasaR")
# Then you should use option "build_vignettes = TRUE":
devtools::install_github("Liu-Zhichao/nasaR", build_vignettes = TRUE)

1. You can get your own NASA API token at: NASA_API. It is highly recommended that you place your private token in the R environment file, and name it “NASA_TOKEN”. (the usethis::edit_r_environ() function will be useful). It could help your access to the data be much safer and faster.

Examples

These are some basic examples which show you how to get access to the data you want:

library(nasaR)
## Download an HD astronomy picture of 2019/12/01 and return its explanation text as well.
APOD(date = as.Date("2019-12-01"), hd = TRUE, return_text = TRUE)

#> [1] "Why does this galaxy have a ring of bright blue stars?  Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici). A popular target for Earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of view spans about 7,000 light-years across M94's central region. The featured close-up highlights the galaxy's compact, bright nucleus, prominent inner dust lanes, and the remarkable bluish ring of young massive stars. The ring stars are all likely less than 10 million years old, indicating that M94 is a starburst galaxy that is experiencing an epoch of rapid star formation from inspiraling gas. The circular ripple of blue stars is likely a wave propagating outward, having been triggered by the gravity and rotation of a oval matter distributions. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can better explore details of its starburst ring.    Astrophysicists: Browse 2,000+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library"

## Return info of technology which NASA is working on since 2019/12/01.
Techport(update_since = as.Date("2019-12-01"))
#> $projects
#> $projects$totalCount
#> [1] 22
#> 
#> $projects$projects
#> $projects$projects[[1]]
#> $projects$projects[[1]]$id
#> [1] 95973
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[1]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-10"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[2]]
#> $projects$projects[[2]]$id
#> [1] 95074
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[2]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-9"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[3]]
#> $projects$projects[[3]]$id
#> [1] 93127
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[3]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-6"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[4]]
#> $projects$projects[[4]]$id
#> [1] 95917
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[4]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[5]]
#> $projects$projects[[5]]$id
#> [1] 95885
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[5]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[6]]
#> $projects$projects[[6]]$id
#> [1] 95884
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[6]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[7]]
#> $projects$projects[[7]]$id
#> [1] 95883
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[7]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[8]]
#> $projects$projects[[8]]$id
#> [1] 95882
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[8]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[9]]
#> $projects$projects[[9]]$id
#> [1] 95881
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[9]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[10]]
#> $projects$projects[[10]]$id
#> [1] 95880
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[10]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[11]]
#> $projects$projects[[11]]$id
#> [1] 95879
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[11]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[12]]
#> $projects$projects[[12]]$id
#> [1] 95878
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[12]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[13]]
#> $projects$projects[[13]]$id
#> [1] 95877
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[13]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[14]]
#> $projects$projects[[14]]$id
#> [1] 95876
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[14]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[15]]
#> $projects$projects[[15]]$id
#> [1] 95874
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[15]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[16]]
#> $projects$projects[[16]]$id
#> [1] 95872
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[16]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[17]]
#> $projects$projects[[17]]$id
#> [1] 95916
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[17]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[18]]
#> $projects$projects[[18]]$id
#> [1] 95913
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[18]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[19]]
#> $projects$projects[[19]]$id
#> [1] 95912
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[19]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[20]]
#> $projects$projects[[20]]$id
#> [1] 95909
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[20]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[21]]
#> $projects$projects[[21]]$id
#> [1] 95908
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[21]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"
#> 
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[22]]
#> $projects$projects[[22]]$id
#> [1] 95907
#> 
#> $projects$projects[[22]]$lastUpdated
#> [1] "2019-12-3"

## Return the most recent info about weather on Mars.
Insight(simplified_data_frame = TRUE)
#>                    First_UTC             Last_UTC    High      Low
#> Sol 362 2019-12-03T04:01:27Z 2019-12-04T04:41:02Z -21.174  -98.548
#> Sol 363 2019-12-04T04:41:02Z 2019-12-05T05:20:37Z -21.075  -99.804
#> Sol 364 2019-12-05T05:20:37Z 2019-12-06T06:00:12Z -20.347  -99.893
#> Sol 365 2019-12-06T06:00:13Z 2019-12-07T06:39:47Z -21.531    -98.8
#> Sol 366 2019-12-07T06:39:48Z 2019-12-08T00:34:43Z -20.442  -98.941
#> Sol 367 2019-12-08T09:18:29Z 2019-12-09T07:58:59Z -20.914 -139.936
#> Sol 368 2019-12-09T07:58:59Z 2019-12-10T08:38:35Z -20.919 -100.049

Announcement

R CRAN has an official NASA API interface package called nasadata. However, the version is quite old and has no longer been updated since 2016, and the functions in this package only take the Earth into consideration, info about other planets/objects in the space are not included in the package. So I decide to make an update(includes all the contents nasadata has and more) and build up various functions for acquiring NASA data easily from available APIs as complete as possible. Although a few functions seems to be similar in two packages(e.g. Earth_Assets in nasaR v.s. earth_assets in nasadata), I wrote all the functions myself without any references. Find more info about similarities/updates in the vignette file.

Find Out More

You can find lots of useful helper documents in nasaR package. If you don’t know meaning of some specific functions, you could check NASA API official website for detailed information. I believe that you can find the solution there. If you find any questions or have some interesting new idea of the package, feel free to contact the author directly or leave an issue here. Thank you!

Liu-Zhichao/nasaR documentation built on Dec. 16, 2019, 10:48 p.m.