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The NASA Space Apps Challenge

  • 08 Nov 2024
  • Text by Riya, SEDS-NTU

The NASA Space Apps Challenge is a renowned global hackathon that gathers creative minds to tackle real-world challenges, offering a fast-paced environment where participants have just 48 hours to build functional prototypes. The event emphasises global collaboration, technical innovation, and a commitment to solving real-world problems. This year’s theme, “The Sun Touches Everything,” emphasised the profound impact of the Sun on Earth and our wider universe, guiding participants to explore solutions across a range of solar-influenced phenomena. SEDS-NTU had two teams participating in the Hackathon, taking on the Exosky and Chronicles of Exoplanet Exploration challenges, during the weekend of 5th and 6th October 2024.

The Exosky challenge called for an app or interface allowing users to view the night sky from the perspective of over 5,500 known exoplanets catalogued by NASA. The aim was to help students visualise these distant skies and spark creativity by allowing them to name and draw new constellations. The Exosky team set out to develop an interface that would allow users to view the night sky as it would appear from different exoplanets. By leveraging data from the Gaia mission and the NASA Exoplanet Archive, the team simulated stellar views from various exoplanets, adjusting both the position and brightness of stars. The goal was to create an educational tool to help users visualise stellar constellations from the perspective of exoplanets located far beyond our solar system. The team initially faced data retrieval limits with the Gaia database, necessitating query optimisation and workarounds to maximise data processing. Certain exoplanet attributes, like inclination and obliquity, were also sometimes missing, requiring the team to incorporate randomness in these values to approximate realistic pole orientations.

The project culminated in a CSV file containing recalculated star coordinates and magnitudes, along with a detailed simulation showcasing how the night sky might look from an exoplanet 584 light-years away from Earth. This included visual changes in star positions and brightness, providing an interactive educational experience. This project effectively simulates how stars appear from the perspective of an exoplanet by coordinate transformation, brightness calculation, and data optimisation. This project is important because it enhances our understanding of stellar visibility from exoplanets, informing future astronomical observations and studies on habitability, potentially guiding the search for extraterrestrial life. It also demonstrates the integration of astrophysical data analysis with practical computational techniques, fostering advancements in the field of exoplanet research.

Stars in the night sky. Image: Thirdman, Pexels

Our second team chose to tackle the Chronicles of Exoplanet Exploration challenge. While similar to the Exosky challenge, this challenge was about more than building a tool; it was about fostering a lifelong interest in exoplanet science for students everywhere, particularly those from underserved communities. The goal was to create learning materials that would explain the vast diversity of exoplanets and convey the excitement of space exploration in accessible and engaging ways.

For this challenge, the team created a game called Exoplanet Hunter, combining real-world scientific methods and data from NASA’s exoplanet archives with an immersive gaming experience that invites players to embark on a journey to discover habitable exoplanets. Exoplanet Hunter allows players to explore distant galaxies, use scientific instruments, and analyse exoplanet data, making the science behind planetary discovery fun and accessible.

Translating scientific methods into gameplay was a challenge, as it required balancing educational content with fun, intuitive interactions. The team tackled this by simplifying complex concepts into digestible tasks that fit within the game’s structure. Exoplanet Hunter merges education and entertainment, allowing players to connect with exoplanet science in a way that feels both enjoyable and informative. By teaching the fundamental principles of exoplanet discovery through a gaming format, it offers an accessible platform for fostering curiosity about space exploration and scientific inquiry.

The Solar System. Image: Zelch Csaba, Pexels

The Space Apps Challenge was a rewarding journey for our teams, pushing us to think creatively and work collaboratively. The sheer volume of data available through NASA’s open platforms was both a blessing and a challenge. Moreover, with only 48 hours to develop a working prototype, time was a constraint, and there was little room for error. Each team needed to select relevant data, clean it, and process it efficiently within the limited time frame. It was a technical feat, involving everything from integrating diverse datasets to troubleshooting machine learning models. 

Exosky and Exoplanet Hunter both represented the challenge’s theme—The Sun Touches Everything—by making space science accessible and engaging to diverse audiences. Exosky helped users reimagine constellations from distant worlds, while Exoplanet Hunter invited players to participate in the thrill of scientific discovery. Both projects underscored the power of integrating data analysis, creativity, and educational design to inspire curiosity about the universe. We gained new skills, learned to navigate complex datasets, and found creative solutions to technical challenges. As we look forward, we’re excited to refine our projects and continue contributing to the fields of space science and education.

Although results and global nominations are not out yet, we are incredibly proud of our work at the NASA Space Apps Challenge and we look forward to building upon the projects we started. Part of SEDS-NTU’s main goal is to bring the field of space science to everyone, making it open to all those who are interested in learning more about it. Ultimately, our journey at the NASA Space Apps Challenge was about more than creating solutions; it was about being part of a global community dedicated to using science and technology to make a difference.

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