The 10th edition of NASA's International Space Apps Challenge, considered the largest annual global hackathon in the world, is all set to begin on October 2-3, the space agency announced in a press release on Friday.
Since 2012, thousands of teams comprising technologists, scientists, designers, entrepreneurs, artists, and others have collaborated to solve real-world and space challenges designed by NASA personnel, using open-source data.
This year, the American space agency is collaborating with nine other space agencies — ESA (European Space Agency), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Canadian Space Agency, Australian Space Agency, Brazilian Space Agency, National Space Activities Commission of Argentina, Paraguayan Space Agency, South African National Space Agency and the Bahrain National Space Agency.
A total of 26,000 teams were said to have participated last year. A group from IIT Delhi were among the winners. Team ASPIRE "worked on the challenge Scanning for Lifeforms, which asked teams to track and predict changes in biological diversity over time using space agency data," a NASA release said.
"They created a model using ground-based and satellite-based data of variables such as temperature and precipitation to forecast biological diversity. With this model, they would be able to predict places that will be habitable in the future for particular species around the world. For their work, they won the award for Best Use of Science," the release added.