If you’ve ever dreamed of saving the world from an impending asteroid collision, and you’ve got a better solution than hiring Bruce Willis to bomb the asteroid to smithereens, we’ve got the competition for you.
On April 12 and 13, during NASA’s third annual Space Apps Challenge, hundreds of scientists and software engineers joined together in a 48-hour hackathon to come up with solutions to vexing global and interstellar problems. NASA comes up with the puzzlers for the event, and anybody with the engineering chops to work on them is invited to try. Teams on six continents and at over a hundred locations work on the problems.
In total, there were 40 challenges, such as this one in the category of asteroids: “Create an open source network of quick-response robotic telescopes that would enable fast follow-up observations of potentially-threatening asteroids.” Other tasks included trying to make a “Track that Wetland” app — allowing citizen scientists to record observations and data on the wetlands in their communities — and creating a design for a greenhouse that NASA could use to keep visitors on the moon or Mars stocked with fresh produce.
Each year, the challenges result in the creation of useful apps. Last year, software engineer James Wanga’s team won the Best Hardware Prize for building the prototype of an asteroid mapper. Wanga told Denise Chow of Space.com, “There’s a spirit that infects everyone when we realize all these people around the world are working on the same thing.”
After participating in the NASA Challenge, Wanga and three colleagues started the company Go Lab, which builds tiny satellites for all sorts of uses. Wanga and Co. were at it again this year, coding all weekend long at the Manhattan NASA Space Apps Challenge location in an effort to build a network that could one day allow far-flung astronauts to communicate in space.
“We all understand here that we’re trying to change the world,” Wanga told Chow. “This is the beginning of the space tech boom, and the people here right now are the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of space tech start-ups.”
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Tag: space
How NASA Went Above and Beyond to Help a 4-Year-Old Boy With Homework
Did you know that when NASA isn’t too busy discovering planets or launching rockets into space, they also give homework help? That’s what little Lucas Whiteley discovered after he recently asked the rocket scientists for some help for his science project.
As the Telegraph reports, Whiteley filmed his three questions for the space agency and sent them off via email. Three weeks later, he got a very detailed response from NASA engineer Ted Garbeff. Garbeff personally answered the 4-year-old’s questions about how many stars there are in the universe (about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), who came in second and third in the race to the moon (Russia and China), and if any animals have been to the moon (No). He also included a 10-minute tour of NASA’s facilities on their Mountain View, Calif. base. (You can read the Q&A and watch the vitural tour here.)
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Lucas was, well, over the moon and even showed the video to his school during an assembly. His father, James, told the Telegraph, “When I was a kid I wrote to NASA and got a brochure, so when Lucas was doing a project on space I thought we might be lucky if we sent a video of Lucas asking some questions. What we got back was amazing. Obviously Ted has thought about his audience and gone to a lot of trouble just for them.”
“When I sat down to watch it with Lucas he had a big smile on his face,” he added. “Ted is a fantastic bloke to go out of his way to do something for someone he doesn’t know on the other side of the world.” Here’s to inspiring the next generation of astronauts.
Can This Six-Year-Old Get Us to Mars?
Connor Johnson, an aspiring astronaut, wasn’t happy when he learned that congress was cutting NASA’s budget. The Colorado six-year-old decided to donate the contents of his piggy bank, $10.41, to NASA, and start a petition to the President to ask the government not to withdraw funding. Eugene Cernan, the last astronaut to walk on the moon, recently called Connor to encourage him. And Connor’s not the only one who wants the NASA funding restored—astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently told a Senate hearing that if America raised NASA’s budget from less than half a penny per government dollar spent to a full penny, “we can transform the country.”