“The NASA International Space Apps Challenge (Space Apps) is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space.

For one weekend each October, participants from around the world come together over a 48-hour period to solve challenges submitted by NASA personnel. After the hackathon, project submissions are judged by space agency experts and winners are selected for one of 10 Global Awards.

Space Apps introduces problem-solvers worldwide to NASA’s free and open data. By using NASA data to solve each year’s challenges, Space Apps teams learn about NASA’s data, and share in the creation and application of the knowledge that results.

Space Apps also inspires collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Our mission is to leverage this interest to encourage the growth and diversity of the next generation of scientists, technologists, designers, storytellers, and engineers.”

Credit: https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/ 

1. Create Virtual teams.
2. As you create your teams and craft your solutions, please consider the six categories: Observe, Inform, Sustain, Create, Confront, and Connect. More details found on the following link.
3. Many of the challenges invite participants to explore open data from Earth-observing satellites. Some examples include:

• Scanning for Lifeforms
  This challenge addresses a pressing global need to track change in biological diversity, which is threatened by human-driven environmental change. Use space agency data to develop innovative ways to detect biological diversity on Earth, track and predict changes over time, and communicate that information to scientists and society.
• Home Planet at Your Fingertips
  Develop a user-friendly application or tool to discover, visualize, and analyze NASA Earth data for monitoring our home planet.
• What is our Carbon Footprint?
  Your challenge is to identify local sources of carbon emissions and/or estimate amounts of carbon emissions for different human activities to aid scientists in mapping carbon sources and sinks. How can you inform decisions to adapt to the consequences of a changing world and aid policy makers in making plans for the future?
• Mission to Planet Earth: A Digital History
  NASA’s activities in space have brought new knowledge of the Earth, inspiring new ways of thinking about humanity and the planet. However, many people aren’t aware that NASA studies the Earth in addition to other planets. Your challenge is to tell stories of NASA’s Earth science enterprise using interactive digital tools. This will test your technical skills and your ability to think like a historian or educator.
• Spot That Fire V3.0
  Recent wildfires worldwide have demonstrated the importance of rapid wildfire detection, mitigation, and community impact assessment analysis. Your challenge is to develop and/or augment an existing application to detect, predict, and assess the economic impacts from actual or potential wildfires by leveraging high-frequency data from a new generation of geostationary satellites, data from polar-orbiting environmental satellites, and other open-source datasets.
• Data Discovery for Earth Science
  Websites like NASA’s Earth Observatory showcase the many uses of satellite data to highlight interesting natural events. This challenge will ask you to devise a tool or technique to guide users to relevant datasets to study specific events.