Introduction
Weather is tracked and analyzed every day to help airplanes have safe flights. Many weather conditions must be monitored to ensure that the likelihood of something negative happening to the aircraft is as low as possible. With rocket launches, the risk and outcomes of a bit of misread or untracked data can be devastating.
With higher altitudes, more power, and the inability to control the direction of the rocket, the accuracy of safe weather predictions is one of the most challenging and important parts of space exploration. The complexities increase even more when the timeline is taken into account. Launch dates are decided years in advance to accommodate massive scheduling and preparation efforts.
We don't have the subject matter expertise or access to as much weather data as NASA does. However, this module will guide you through using easily accessible weather data to simulate how NASA scientists approach the same problem. This module teaches you how to prepare basic weather data so you can train a machine learning model to predict good days for rocket launches.
This module will look at:
- Conditions (cloudy, partly cloudy, fair, rain, thunder, heavy storm)
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Wind speed
- Wind direction
- Precipitation
- Visibility
- Sea level
- Pressure
Tip
This module is part of a multimodal learning experience. Follow along with a video walkthrough of the module in a new tab.
Learning objectives
In this module, you will:
- Explore data about weather on days when rockets with crews and rockets without crews were launched.
- Explore data about weather on the days surrounding launch days.
- Clean the data in preparation for training the machine learning model.