web-scraping-challenge

This new assignment consists of two technical products:

• Deliverable 1: Scrape titles and preview text from Mars news articles.
• Deliverable 2: Scrape and analyze Mars weather data.

Deliverable 1: Scrape Titles and Preview Text from Mars News

1. I used Splinter to visit https://static.bc-edx.com/data/web/mars_news/index.html.

2. I created a Beautiful Soup object and used it to extract the text elements from the website.

3. I stored the article titles and preview texts of the news articles in a title-and-preview pair in a Python list of dictionaries, giving each dictionary two keys: title and preview.

Deliverable 2: Scrape and Analyze Mars Weather Data**

1. I used Splinter to visit https://static.bc-edx.com/data/web/mars_facts/temperature.html.
2. I created a Beautiful Soup object and used it to extract the data in the HTML table.
3. I assembled the data into a Pandas DataFrame, with the columns having the same headings as the table on the website.

• These are the column headings:
  • id: the identification number of a single transmission from the Curiosity rover
  • terrestrial_date: the date on Earth
  • sol: the number of elapsed sols (Martian days) since Curiosity landed on Mars
  • ls: the solar longitude
  • month: the Martian month
  • min_temp: the minimum temperature, in Celsius, of a single Martian day (sol)
  • pressure: The atmospheric pressure at Curiosity's location

4. Next, I examined the data types that are currently associated with each column and casted id, sol, ls, and month to integer, terrestial_date to datetime, and min_temp and pressure columns to float.
5. Analyzed the dataset by using Pandas functions to answer the following questions:
   • How many months exist on Mars?
     • A: 12 months
   • How many Martian (and not Earth) days worth of data exist in the scraped dataset?
     • A: 12 months
   • What are the coldest and the warmest months on Mars (at the location of Curiosity)?
     • To answer this question:
       • Find the average the minimum daily temperature for all of the months.
       • Plot the results as a bar chart.
     • A: On average, the third month has the coldest minimum temperature on Mars, and the eighth month is the warmest.
   • Which months have the lowest and the highest atmospheric pressure on Mars?
     • To answer this question:
       • Find the average the daily atmospheric pressure of all the months.
       • Plot the results as a bar chart.
     • A: Atmospheric pressure is, on average, lowest in the sixth month and highest in the ninth.
   • About how many terrestrial (Earth) days exist in a Martian year?
     • A: The distance from peak to peak is roughly 1425-750, or 675 days. A year on Mars appears to be about 675 days from the plot. Internet search confirms that a Mars year is equivalent to 687 earth days.