Citizen programmers, coding enthusiasts, storytellers, and designers around the world are flexing their fingers and stocking up on caffeine for the ninth annual NASA International Space Apps Challenge – the 48-hour global hackathon that challenges individuals to use NASA (and this year, partner space agencies) open data to tackle a variety of practical, real-world problems on Earth and in space.
The theme for this year’s all-virtual marathon, set for Oct. 2-4, is “Take Action,” a reminder that individuals can help come up with solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems.
The 2020 challenge will be regionally hosted by Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, Alabama, in coordination with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, also in Huntsville, which was the Mainstage host for the international event from 2018-2019. Sites around the world will host tandem localized, virtual hackathons.
“We’re honored to join with NASA and its global counterparts to carry on this tradition of achievement, innovation, and creativity,” said Ed Pearson, organizing committee chair at Alabama A&M. “More than 200 unique Space Apps Challenge events took place in 2019 alone, spanning more than 70 countries. In a year defined by virtual connectivity, we hope to see even greater global engagement than ever before.”
“We like to celebrate NASA’s communities like Huntsville, home to so many inventive minds and visionary ideas,” said Sandra Cauffman, deputy director of the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “But NASA’s impact does not stop at the city’s edge, or at county or state lines. NASA’s innovation and vision is a shared quest among people of imagination and foresight all over the world. The Space Apps Challenge seeks to embrace that global ingenuity for the good of the people of our planet.”
Each year, the world-wide hackathon – which complements NASA Centennial Challenges, various STEM-themed competitions, and design challenges – offers a variety of challenges devised by NASA experts and other professionals. Some are designed to support and enhance scientific investigation and environmental awareness. Others seek ways to organize and share data for public use. Still others pursue creative games, tools, and interactive platforms to help engage and inform younger generations about their world and the universe beyond. Categories are broken up along these broad lines:
- Observe: Devise tools to make space-based and ground-based Earth observation data more accessible and useful for scientists, decision-makers, and the public.
- Inform: Come up with effective ways to engage others about scientific and historical information.
- Sustain: Develop ways to take action to sustain our home planet for future generations, and to sustain human life in the harsh conditions of space.
- Create: Imagine, build, and create awareness via new art, hardware, and technology.
- Confront: Making technology a tool for change, tackle a variety of social and environmental issues at local, national, and global levels.
- Connect: Analyze and develop new ways to leverage the worldwide network of people and ideas contributing to humanity’s space-based missions here on Earth and beyond it.
- Participants may even invent their own challenge for other hackers to help resolve. These entries are not eligible for global judging.
Online check-in for the Huntsville regional event will begin Friday, Oct. 2, at 8 a.m. CDT. The event will kick off at 5:30 p.m. with opening remarks from the NASA global team and speakers from Alabama A&M and Marshall. The Huntsville hackathon will start at 8 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 3, and the awards ceremony and closing events will begin at 3 p.m.
Challenges are as varied and imaginative as the people who create them. Marshall engineer Dan O’Neil, a frequent Space Apps contributor, created the “Virtual Planetary Exploration” challenge, intended to help prepare a practical array of research tools and reference information for Artemis Generation explorations of the lunar surface. His friend and colleague Andrew Denio, an information technology specialist at Marshall, devised a pair of tasks: “Can You Hear Me Now?” which seeks interactive applications to aid communications between Earth and future explorers on Mars, and “Putting the Art in Artemis,” which strives to inform and inspire audiences with original art celebrating humankind’s road to Mars.
“I love opportunities to inform the public about NASA’s work, and to engage students, entrepreneurs, and citizen scientists in our missions,” O’Neil said.
Tracie Prater, a Marshall materials engineer who devised the new “Space Exploration in Your Backyard” challenge, routinely visits K-12 classrooms to talk about NASA – and it gave her an idea.
“I’ve found that many students assume that if they’re not near a NASA center, there’s no aerospace work in their vicinity,” she said. “I wanted to see if we could use Space Apps to show the public how space exploration, science, and technology development touch nearly every state and region of the country.”
Utilizing resources such as NASA’s Small Business Innovative Research database, university awards announcements, and other NASA contractor and partner data, her challenge seeks to identify the spectrum of large and small businesses, academic institutions and even “garage innovators” in any given area of the country who directly contribute to NASA’s space exploration and aeronautics work.
“Good ideas can come from anywhere,” Prater said. “I can’t wait to see what hackathon participants come up with this year!”
This year, Space Apps is partnering with the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, the Canadian Space Agency, and France’s National Centre for Space Studies. In addition, more than 400 volunteer judges, experts, Ambassadors, and Local Leads will be supporting the event. To learn more, follow the event on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, or visit: