🪐 Astro Explorer

A live space dashboard built on NASA's open data — today's astronomy picture, near-Earth asteroid tracking, and real-time ISS position, all in one place.

Live Demo Built with React + Vite

Features

• Picture of the Day — NASA's daily featured astronomy image, with a date picker to browse any day back to 1995
• Asteroid Tracker — near-Earth objects approaching in the next 7 days, sortable by distance or size, filterable by hazard status
• ISS Live — real-time position of the International Space Station, polling every 5 seconds, plotted on a world map with a movement trail

Tech stack

• React + Vite
• NASA Open APIs (APOD, NeoWs)
• wheretheiss.at for live ISS position data (chosen over the older Open Notify API, which has known reliability issues)

Running locally

```bash git clone https://github.com/rishikasingh2007-code/astro-explorer.git cd astro-explorer npm install npm run dev ```

Get a free NASA API key at api.nasa.gov, then create a .env file:

(The app falls back to NASA's shared DEMO_KEY if you skip this, but it's rate-limited to 30 requests/hour.)

What I learned building this

• Managing async data fetching with proper loading/error states across multiple independent components
• Using useEffect cleanup functions to safely poll an API on an interval without memory leaks
• Structuring a small React app into clean, single-responsibility components