Mission to Mars

In this assignment, you will build a web application that scrapes various websites for data related to the Mission to Mars and displays the information in a single HTML page.

Step 1 - Scraping

Complete your initial scraping using Jupyter Notebook, BeautifulSoup, Pandas, and Requests/Splinter.

• Create a Jupyter Notebook file called mission_to_mars.ipynb and use this to complete all of your scraping and analysis tasks. The following outlines what you need to scrape.

NASA Mars News

• Scrape the Mars News Site and collect the latest News Title and Paragraph Text. Assign the text to variables that you can reference later.

• Use Splinter to navigate the sites when needed and BeautifulSoup to help find and parse out the necessary data.

# Example:
news_title = "NASA's Next Mars Mission to Investigate Interior of Red Planet"

news_p = "Preparation of NASA's next spacecraft to Mars, InSight, has ramped up this summer, on course for launch next May from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California -- the first interplanetary launch in history from America's West Coast."

JPL Mars Space Images - Featured Image

• Visit the url for the Featured Space Image site here.

• Use splinter to navigate the site and find the image url for the current Featured Mars Image and assign the url string to a variable called featured_image_url.

• Make sure to find the image url to the full size .jpg image.

• Make sure to save a complete url string for this image.

Mars Facts

• Visit the Mars Facts webpage here and use Pandas to scrape the table containing facts about the planet including Diameter, Mass, etc.

• Use Pandas to convert the data to a HTML table string.

Mars Hemispheres

• Visit the astrogeology site here to obtain high resolution images for each of Mar's hemispheres.

• You will need to click each of the links to the hemispheres in order to find the image url to the full resolution image.

• Save both the image url string for the full resolution hemisphere image, and the Hemisphere title containing the hemisphere name. Use a Python dictionary to store the data using the keys img_url and title.

• Append the dictionary with the image url string and the hemisphere title to a list. This list will contain one dictionary for each hemisphere.

---

Step 2 - MongoDB and Flask Application

Use MongoDB with Flask templating to create a new HTML page that displays all of the information that was scraped from the URLs above.

• Start by converting your Jupyter notebook into a Python script called scrape_mars.py with a function called scrape that will execute all of your scraping code from above and return one Python dictionary containing all of the scraped data.

• Next, create a route called /scrape that will import your scrape_mars.py script and call your scrape function.

  • Store the return value in Mongo as a Python dictionary.
  • Use Pymongo for CRUD applications for your database. For this assignment, you can simply overwrite the existing document each time the /scrape url is visited and new data is obtained.

• Create a root route / that will query your Mongo database and pass the mars data into an HTML template to display the data.

• Create a template HTML file called index.html that will take the mars data dictionary and display all of the data in the appropriate HTML elements.

---

© 2021 Trilogy Education Services, LLC, a 2U, Inc. brand. Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved.