Mars Web Scrape Info Page

In this project I built a web application that scrapes various websites for data related to the Mission to Mars and displays the information in a single HTML page. The following outlines what I did.

Technolgies: Jupyter Notebook, BeautifulSoup, Pandas, and Requests/Splinter, MongoDB, Python, Flask, SQLAlchemy

Step 1 - Scraping

1. NASA Mars News: https://mars.nasa.gov/news/?page=0&per_page=40&order=publish_date+desc%2Ccreated_at+desc&search=&category=19%2C165%2C184%2C204&blank_scope=Latest

• First I scraped the NASA Mars News Site and collected the latest News Title and Paragraph Text.
• I then Assigned the text to variables to be referenced later.

2. JPL Mars Space Images - Featured Image: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images?search=&category=Mars

• Next I Visited the url for JPL Featured Space Image.
• I then used splinter to navigate the site and find the image url for the current Featured Mars Image and assign the url string to a variable.

3. Mars Facts: https://space-facts.com/mars/

• The next items I grabed were on the Mars Facts webpage.
• I used Pandas to scrape the table containing facts about the planet including Diameter, Mass, etc.
• I then used Pandas to convert the data to a HTML table string.

4. Mars Hemispheres: https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/search/results?q=hemisphere+enhanced&k1=target&v1=Mars ((This sign is currently down and may cause issues))

• Lastly I visited the USGS Astrogeology site here to obtain high resolution images for each of Mar's hemispheres.
• I used splinter to click each of the links to the hemispheres in order to find the image url to the full resolution image.
• I then saved both the image url string for the full resolution hemisphere image, and the Hemisphere title containing the hemisphere name.
• I used a Python dictionary to store the data.
• Then I appended the dictionary with the image url string and the hemisphere title to a list.
• This list contains one dictionary for each hemisphere.

Step 2 - MongoDB and Flask Application

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

2. I then converted my Jupyter notebook into a Python script with a function called scrape that will execute all of the scraping code from above and return one Python dictionary containing all of the scraped data.

3. Next, I built a route called /scrape that will import the python script and called my scrape function.

4. I Stored the return value in Mongo as a Python dictionary.

5. Next I created a root route / that queries my your Mongo database and passes the mars data into an HTML template to display the data.

6. Lastly I custom built a template HTML file called index.html that takes the mars data dictionary and display's all of the data in the appropriate HTML elements.

Here's what the final product looked like!