A Flask application created by web scraping the latest Mars news, facts, and images and storing in/pulling from a Mongo database.

• /Mission_to_Mars
  • /templates: contains template HTML file for Flask application
  • app.py: Flask application
  • mission_to_mars.ipynb: web scraping Mars news, facts, and images in Jupyter Notebook from various websites
  • scrape_mars.py: web scraping in Python function form for use in Flask application

The latest Mars news, facts, and space images are continually updated. To keep up with that, a web scraping script was created using BeautifulSoup and Splinter in Python. The resulting contents are summarized in a Flask application webpage in this project.

The following websites were scraped and data obtained:

• NASA Mars News Site: latest Mars News Title and associated Paragraph Text
• JPL Featured Space Image: image url for the current Featured Mars Image
• Mars Weather twitter account: latest Mars weather tweet
• Mars Facts webpage: facts table about the Mars including Diameter, Mass, etc.
• USGS Astrogeology site: high resolution images for each of Mar's hemispheres

This data was then stored in a MongoDB collection. This collection is accessed in a Flask app and HTML template (using Jinja) to create the resulting webpage:

Fig. 1: Flask application webpage top Fig. 2: Flask application webpage bottom