NASA Space Apps Challenge 2024 Entry

Context

The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is a hackathon. Teams get 48 hours and a list of challenges published by NASA. Each challenge points at open NASA data and asks for something useful to be made from it. The clock is the main constraint. Scope has to be decided in the first hours, not the last.

I took part in the 2024 edition. The submission was recognised as a Galactic Problem Solver.

Approach

The first step was reading the challenge list and choosing one the team could finish. A challenge that is interesting but too large produces nothing by hour 48. So the choice was made against three tests: is the data available now, can we show a result on screen, and can we explain it in a few minutes.

After that the work split into three tracks running in parallel: getting the data into a usable shape, building the thing that shows it, and writing the submission. Keeping the write-up alive from the beginning matters more than it sounds. A project that cannot be explained does not get judged well.

What I built

The deliverable was a working demonstration plus the written submission that Space Apps requires. The demonstration read the open NASA datasets referenced by the challenge and presented them in a form a reader without a background in the subject could follow.

What I learned

Two things. First, a 48-hour deadline is a design constraint, not an obstacle — it forces you to name the one result you want to show and cut everything that does not serve it. Second, open data is rarely ready to use. A large share of the time went to loading, cleaning and understanding the datasets before anything could be drawn from them.

Note: this entry is a structural placeholder. The competition record is accurate; the technical write-up still needs the owner’s own detail.