Building a NASA Satellite Imagery SMS Bot with Python, Flask, and Twilio

Time to read: 7 minutes

January 26, 2021
Written by
Jamie Corkhill
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Building a NASA Satellite Imagery SMS Bot with Python, Flask, and Twilio

In this article, you’ll learn how to use Twilio Programmable SMS with Python and Flask to build a bot that permits a user to send a text message containing a location, country code, and date, and receive a satellite image for that time and location in response via NASA’s Earth APIs. In the image below, you can see how the bot was used to provide an image of New York City that was captured on January 1st, 2021.

Project demo

Requirements

  • Python 3.6 or newer. You can download a Python interpreter here.
  • A Twilio account with an SMS-capable phone number. If you are new to Twilio, you can create a free account.

Project Configuration

Navigate to the directory where you’d like to create your project, and run the following commands:

mkdir satellite-image-bot
cd satellite-image-bot

Next, create a virtual environment to isolate dependencies:

python3 -m venv venv

Then, activate the environment, which you can do on a Unix-based system with:

. venv/bin/activate

Or on Windows with:

venv\Scripts\activate

For the latter command, if using PowerShell on Windows, ensure you have an ExecutionPolicy that permits the running of scripts.

Install the required dependencies as follows:

pip install twilio flask requests python-dotenv pyngrok

API Setup

With the project created, you can move forward with registering for the external APIs.

To forward geocode a location into a latitude and longitude, you’ll use a service called HERE. Sign up for a free account and generate a REST Project. Click the Create API Key button to generate a key that you can use to access the HERE Location Services REST APIs, which is the first button in the image below:

HERE API key

You’ll use this API Key shortly during the translation process from location to latitude and longitude. Note that if you don’t verify your account, your API key will expire after 60 minutes, thus you’ll have to delete and recreate it.

At the root of your project, create a file entitled .env (notice the preceding dot) and paste the following text within it:

HERE_API_KEY=your-here-api-key
NASA_API_KEY=DEMO_KEY

Replace your-here-api-key with the API Key you received from Here in the prior step. The DEMO_KEY key for the NASA API is a publicly available trial API key provided by NASA for the purposes of testing. This key is sufficient for this project.

Twilio Setup

To complete the configuration, you’ll need to create an SMS-capable phone number for Twilio Programmable SMS if you don’t already have one. Login to the Twilio Console and visit the Buy a Number page. Ensure you have SMS capabilities enabled and click Search:

Buy a Twilio number

When you find a suitable number, select Buy so that it may be provisioned. If you need more information on purchasing phone numbers, visit the relevant page of the Twilio Help Center.

Building the Application

Create a app.py file in the project directory with the following boilerplate for this project:

import os
import datetime

from flask import Flask, request
from twilio.twiml.messaging_response import MessagingResponse
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import requests

load_dotenv()

app = Flask(__name__)


@app.route('/sms', methods=['POST'])
def sms():
    message_text = request.values.get('Body', None)

    resp = MessagingResponse()
    resp.message(f'Echo: {message_text}')

    return str(resp)

After the relevant import statements, you call load_dotenv() so that the two environment variables you saved earlier in the .env file are imported.

Finally, the POST /sms route will act as a webhook that you’ll configure Twilio to execute when it receives an incoming message to your Twilio Phone Number. This endpoint pulls the Body property, which contains the message, off the JSON data body sent by Twilio, and then simply echoes it back.

To test that your echo route works correctly, run the Flask project, which can be done on MacOS or Linux with:

FLASK_ENV=development flask run

Or on Windows with:

set FLASK_ENV=development
flask run

Then open a second terminal window, activate the virtual environment, and then run:

ngrok http 5000

Ngrok is a tool that creates a secure tunnel to any service running on localhost, and in doing so, it provides you with a public URL allowing you to access that service from across the Internet. With the command above, Ngrok will listen to port 5000 on your local machine and will proxy requests from the public URL to the Flask application. After running the command, copy the HTTPS URL as depicted in the image below:

Ngrok screenshot

Once you have that URL, visit the Twilio Phone Number Management Console, select your phone number, and point Twilio to your webhook under the messaging section, as depicted below:

set Twilio webhook

 

Notice that the URL is formed by the https:// forwarding URL from Ngrok with /sms appended to the end. The /sms is the URI of the endpoint in your current project. If you now send an SMS message to your Twilio phone number, you should see your message echoed back.

SMS test

Next, bring the webserver down with Ctrl + C or the appropriate termination button in your IDE if you use one, but keep Ngrok running, for you'll be testing the project again soon.

Since there will be many instances throughout the various code paths where you will want to terminate the request and respond to the user (such as with error messages), you'll abstract the process away into a simple function, which you can create as shown below right above your route handler.

import os
import datetime

from flask import Flask, request
from twilio.twiml.messaging_response import MessagingResponse
from dotenv import load_dotenv
import requests

load_dotenv()


app = Flask(__name__)


def respond(msg: str, media: str = None):
    """Responds to the incoming message with the specified response"""
    resp = MessagingResponse()
    msg = resp.message(msg)

    if media is not None:
        msg.media(media)

    return str(resp)

… (Route handler, etc.)

This function is meant for a one time response use - that is, when you’re ready to respond with a message to a user in the route handler, you’ll simply call respond with that message, returning the result.

Moving on, you’ll expect a text message of the form [location-country]@[YYYY-MM-DD?]:

  • location can be any text-based query, be it a zip code, a city name, a street address, etc.
  • country represents an ISO 3166-1 3-letter country code, such as USA.
  • YYYY-MM-DD? is an optional date representing the day on which the satellite image was captured. If you don’t specify one, the current date will be used by default.

Examples of valid queries include:

  • 10001-USA
  • 94102-USA@2021-01-01
  • New York-USA
  • San Francisco-USA@2021-01-01
  • 20 W 34th St, New York, NY 10001-USA@2021-01-01

You’ll want to parse and validate the upcoming SMS message to ensure it’s of the proper form (specified above). To do so, add the following function right underneath the respond function.

def parse_and_validate_msg(msg: str):
    """Validates a given message for a location"""
    msg = msg.strip()

    if len(msg) < 2:
        raise ValueError('The specified location is invalid.')

    location = ''
    country_code = ''
    date = ''

    if '@' in msg:
        parts = msg.split('@')

        if '-' not in parts[0]:
            raise ValueError('No country code was specified.')

        location = parts[0].split('-')[0]
        country_code = parts[0].split('-')[1]
        date = parts[1]

        try:
            datetime.datetime.strptime(date, '%Y-%m-%d')
        except ValueError:
            raise ValueError('Invalid date format, should be YYYY-MM-DD.')
    else:
        if '-' not in msg:
            raise ValueError('No country code specified.')

        location = msg.split('-')[0]
        country_code = msg.split('-')[1]

    return location, country_code, date

Here, you raise ValueError exceptions if the message length isn’t long enough, if there isn’t a country code, or if the date (assuming it’s provided) is of an incorrect format.

Next, you’ll want to add the functions that handle contacting the HERE and NASA APIs - the former for forward geocoding and the latter to obtain an image URI.

The HERE Location Services, as per their documentation, accept a GET request containing a q and apiKey query parameter, and return a list of items each containing a position property, which you’ll want to extract from the first.

That is, for a request of the form GET https://geocode.search.hereapi.com/v1/geocode?q=5+Rue+Daunou%2C+75000+Paris%2C+France&apiKey=API_KEY, you can expect a response of the form:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "title": "5 Rue Daunou, 75002 Paris, France",
      "id": "here:af:streetsection:z42doZW8EyzEiPcuOd5MXB:CggIBCCi-9SPARABGgE1KGQ",
      "resultType": "houseNumber",
      "houseNumberType": "PA",
      "address": {
        "label": "5 Rue Daunou, 75002 Paris, France",
        "countryCode": "FRA",
        "countryName": "France",
        "state": "Île-de-France",
        "county": "Paris",
        "city": "Paris",
        "district": "2e Arrondissement",
        "street": "Rue Daunou",
        "postalCode": "75002",
        "houseNumber": "5"
      },
      "position": {
        "lat": 48.86926,
        "lng": 2.3321
      },
      "access": [
        {
          "lat": 48.86931,
          "lng": 2.33215
        }
      ],
      "mapView": {
        "west": 2.33073,
        "south": 48.86836,
        "east": 2.33347,
        "north": 48.87016
      }
    }
  ]
}

You’ll be most interested in the lat and lng properties available on position on the first item of the list.

Similarly, NASA’s API will expect a GET request containing the lat, lon, date, dim, and api_key query parameters, and will return a response containing either a url property, which points to the satellite image, or an error message if no image could be found.

  • lat is the target latitude.
  • lon is the target longitude. Notice that the NASA API refers to this as lon while HERE API uses lng. That’s fine, it just requires a trivial mapping step.
  • date is the target date for the image. The API may not always be able to find an image for the specified date and location and will error out if so.
  • dim is short for dimensions, and you will set it to the constant 0.15, which produces clean-looking images.

With that, add the following code right underneath your parse_and_validate_msg function:

def geocode_location(location: str, country_code: str):
    """Geocodes a location into a latitude and longitude"""
    api_key = os.environ.get('HERE_API_KEY')
    response = requests.get('https://geocode.search.hereapi.com/v1/geocode', params={
        'q': location,
        'in': f'countryCode:{country_code}',
        'apiKey': api_key
    })
    response.raise_for_status()

    json = response.json()

    if 'items' not in json or len(json['items']) < 1:
        raise ValueError('We could not geocode your location. Is it correct?')

    position = json['items'][0]['position']
    return position['lat'], position['lng']


def fetch_satellite_image_uri(lat, lng, date=None):
    """Fetches the URI of a satellite image of the given location for the given time"""
    api_key = os.environ.get('NASA_API_KEY')
    response = requests.get('https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/earth/assets', params={
        'lat': lat,
        'lon': lng,
        'date': date or datetime.date.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d'),
        'dim': '0.15',
        'api_key': api_key
    })

    if response.status_code == 404:
        raise ValueError('No satellite image is available for the specified date and time.')

    response.raise_for_status()

    json = response.json()

    return json['url']

The first function makes the GET request to the HERE API and then parses the JSON response for the first location item in the list, pulling the lat and lng properties off of position. If they don’t exist or if there is no zeroth item, then this will raise an exception with an appropriate error message, which will be caught in the route handler later and sent to the user. Similarly, for the second function, you make the request and parse the satellite image URL off the response. Once again, if there is no URL, an exception will be raised and caught later.

All that’s left is to update your route handler in order to make use of these functions. Replace it with the following code:

@app.route('/sms', methods=['POST'])
def sms():
    message_text = request.values.get('Body', None)

    # Ensure there is a message.
    if message_text is None:
        return respond('The location was malformed. Please try again.')

    try:
        # Pull the location, country, and date out of the string.
        location, country_code, date = parse_and_validate_msg(message_text)

        # Geocode the location into coordinates
        lat, lng = geocode_location(location, country_code)

        # Fetch the image uri
        uri = fetch_satellite_image_uri(lat, lng, date)

        # Send the MMS response
        return respond('Your image:', uri)
    except ValueError as e:
        return respond(str(e))
    except Exception as e:
        print(str(e))
        return respond('An error occurred')

In this route handler, if there is no incoming message, you respond with an error message. Most SMS services won’t permit the sending of a message with no content, thus this is more of a sanity check. If any ValueError exceptions are raised, you respond to the client with those error messages. You can do that because you own the exceptions and there’s no risk of them containing sensitive data.

If any other exception is raised, it could be due to the API response or some transient network error, thus you respond with a slightly more generic message.

The project is now complete and you’re ready to test it.

Running the Application

If Ngrok is still running, the service will be ready to use once you bring the web server up using the method described above. Otherwise, you’ll have to restart Ngrok and re-configure the webhook URL in the Twilio Console.

Note that not all dates and times will have an associated image. You may have to experiment a little to find a date that works for your location. The satellite passes over each point on Earth every 16 days (approximately), so keep that in mind when searching. The date 2021-01-01 seems to work for most locations. If you do too many searches, you may exceed NASA’s permitted rate for that demo key, thus you’ll have to wait a while or sign up for an account with NASA.

Conclusion

In this project, you learned how to make use of Twilio Programmable SMS, Python, Flask, and external APIs to build a satellite image bot. There are a variety of ways that you could improve on this project, such as by returning a list of possible matches for a location and asking the user to select one, etc.

Jamie is an 18-year-old software developer located in Texas. He has particular interests in enterprise architecture (DDD/CQRS/ES), writing elegant and testable code, and Physics and Mathematics. He is currently working on a startup in the business automation and tech education space, and when not behind a computer, he enjoys reading and learning.

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