Capstone 5 · Certified Space GIS Architect

End-to-End Detection Pipeline

Raw NetCDF → georeferenced detections → PostGIS → REST → 3D globe.

The brief

Build a complete production-grade space-GIS pipeline: ingest 10 frames of GOES-18 ABI Band 7 NetCDF from the NOAA AWS Open Data bucket; georeference each frame (parallax-corrected); threshold-detect hotspots; cluster hotspot pixels across consecutive frames into plume tracks; score each track for confidence (geometric coherence, brightness consistency, motion); persist results to PostGIS with proper indexes; expose a FastAPI /detections REST endpoint with bbox, time-range, and confidence filters; render results live on a Cesium globe served from the same FastAPI app. Deliverable is a public GitHub repository + a 5-minute video walking through the pipeline.

Rubric

  1. Pipeline runs end-to-end on the provided 10-frame test dataset
  2. Detections match the known launch ground truth within 5 km and 30 seconds
  3. False-positive rate < 10% on the test dataset
  4. PostGIS schema includes appropriate GIST indexes for spatial and time queries
  5. REST API is documented via OpenAPI, all endpoints respond within 200 ms
  6. Cesium globe renders detections with hover-popups
  7. GitHub repo is public with clear README, setup instructions, license
  8. 5-minute video clearly explains architecture decisions

Deliverable

Public GitHub repo (Python + JavaScript) + 5-minute video on YouTube/Vimeo + signed-off README

Dataset

https://github.com/launchdetect/academy-labs/tree/main/capstones/05-end-to-end-pipeline

Earned credential

Successful completion of this capstone (all rubric items met) mints the Certified Space GIS Architect certificate at /academy/verify/{certId}/.

Submission. Certificate issuance is gated to LaunchDetect Gold ($9.99/month). Submit your capstone deliverable via the form at /academy/verify/ (coming soon — backend in v2). For now, build it, push to GitHub, and link it on your portfolio.
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