Potential activities

The following list of items could be consulted and updated during meetings to help develop an agenda and plan activities.

1. Here is a specific project description for recruiting a data science student. This is a project idea that could be done by students at OKCU or UALR or ASU.

Consider a source of data on space related activities: planet4589.org. For example, one data file is called psatcat: https://planet4589.org/space/gcat/data/cat/satcat.html.

     There is another file that documents what the columns mean: https://planet4589.org/space/gcat/web/cat/pcols.html.

     The project options are:

Option 1: Apply visualization and analysis tools to find patterns and graphics to help understand the data. For this, knowing what the columns and the data mean would be more important.

Option 2: Apply clustering to identify clusters and outliers. Outliers might contain mistakes in the data, The main point here is to identify possible mistakes based on being outliers. However, the clusters may have interest if there since it is likely they correspond to some meaningful categories, although we don't know what they might be without examining the meanings of the columns and data items.

 2. Satellite data analysis. 

• VK suggested as a measure, for each year, launches*averageLifeSpan. 
• DB suggested lifespan/mass as a figure for each satellite, to be graphed as an average for each year, because cubesats may have lower mass, but lower lifespan, and still be an advance in technology. Thus lifespan alone might stop working pretty soon. Is mass data available for satellites? (It is for extraterrestrial spacecraft).
• New satellite data from planet4589. Merge with SATCAT and mine. VB is working on it.
• An analysis of lifespan trends on a per-country basis or per-organization basis would be interesting (MH suggested finding out to what extent the variation in satellite lifespan might be caused by new space programs). Same with lifespans and perigees.
• What if we analyze only SATCAT reentry status dates, and compare with the present analysis of all statuses except "in orbit." Probably would make little difference, but should compare to test this.
• Some potentially relevant background reading is at http://www.spaceworkscommercial.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/SpaceWorks_Spacecraft_Mass_Trends_2014.pdf.
• VK has applied for Affiliate Graduate Faculty Status so he could officially help advise VB.

3. Teaching track. DB used the google sheet to illustrate operator precedence in class. RS teaches engineering stat and may have some use for the trend and envelope analyses he's done on the data. These could be used for a future publication as well. 4/12/19: HA will be teaching python soon and could potentially use our data for class exercises and so on. We need to support that and work in that direction.

4. Article and forum discussions (see "Reading list" tab for lists). 

5. Future potential agenda items planned: We may in the future discuss this on distributional forecasts. Should we find a MS student to apply this method to space exploration? Also Superexponential Long-term Trends in Information Technology by Nagy et al. looks interesting to discuss.