NASA Space Apps Challenge, the largest hackathon in the world, has opened registrations

NASA Space Apps Challenge, the largest international hackathon, has launched registrations for the twelfth edition of the competition, which will take place on the weekend of October 7-8 in five cities from Romania, as well as hundreds of other places around the world. The event will take place physically in Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca and online in Timișoara, Iași, and Oradea.

Registrations can be made here until Friday, October 6th, at the end of the day.

Participants can register for the event organized by any of the five cities, regardless of where they come from in Romania. People under the age of 18 who wish to participate must be registered by a parent or legal guardian, and be accompanied to the event by said parent/legal guardian.

Space Apps teams have between 2-6 members. Those who wish to participate can come in already formed teams (registration is done individually) or they can come along and be helped by the organizers to form a team.

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Programmers, scientists, designers, engineers, technology enthusiasts, storytelling specialists, producers, and builders from all over the world can participate in the hackathon. For 48 hours, they will have access to public NASA data and work together to find solutions to real problems, on Earth and in space.

More details about this year’s global event are available here, and about the local editions on Facebook.

An event for those passionate about identifying solutions

“This event is for anyone passionate about identifying solutions, regardless of whether they have ever participated in a hackathon. Thus, we encourage students, engineers, artists, and storytelling experts to sign up for these events because, yes, some challenges are technical, but many tasks require artistic skills, business knowledge, or a lot of imagination. Moreover, precisely because it is a collaborative event, the best teams are those whose members have a range of skills, such as programming, storytelling, science, technology, and engineering,” said Tudor Pasc, Project Manager NASA Space Apps Challenge & Incubation Director ROTSA.

The theme of the event is “Explore Open Science Together”, and this year’s 31 challenges include topics such as Artemis II and You!, Be a Space Geologist, Eclipses: Perspective is Everything, Everything Starts with Water, Habitable Exoplanets: Creating Worlds Beyond Our Own Immersed in the Sounds of Space, Managing Fire: Increasing Community-based Fire Management Opportunities, Mapping Data for Societal Benefit, NASA in Your Neighborhood Ocean Gardens, Open Science Storytelling, Planetary Tourism Office.  

Collaborations with space agencies from around the world. Google Romania, among the supporters of the local edition

For each of the five cities in Romania, two winning teams will be chosen to participate in the global competition, where they will compete with over 3,000 teams from around the world.

The final phase of the NASA Space Apps Challenge will take place online, with more details coming soon.

The mission of the NASA Space Apps Challenge is to foster collaboration, creativity and critical thinking, encourage interest in Earth and space exploration, raise global awareness of NASA data, and develop the next generation of scientists, engineers, technologists and designers.

This year’s Space Agency Partners include the Australian Space Agency, Brazilian Space Agency, Canadian Space Agency, European Space Agency, Indian Space Research Organization, Italian Space Agency, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Mexican Space Agency, National Space Activities Commission of Argentina, National Space Science Agency of Bahrain, Paraguayan Space Agency, South African National Space Agency, and the Turkish Space Agency.

In 2021, during the most recent local edition of the NASA Space Apps Challenge, more than 200 people from Romania between the ages of 16 and 56 participated. Among the six winning projects were a greenhouse to provide nutritional supplements for a mission to Mars, space exploration games or a virtual map highlighting the waste orbiting the Earth.

In Romania, the biggest hackathon in the world is organized by ROTSA, DiFine PR and ClujHub. The first edition of the NASA Space Apps Challenge in Romania took place in 2016.

Among the partners of this edition are Google Romania, Cloudsoft and AIESEC Romania.

Previous editions of the NASA Space Apps Challenge Bucharest can be watched here and here.