UDC students recognized for excellence in NASA projects

A team of six UDC students won third place in the DC region’s competition for the NASA International Space Apps Challenge, which took place worldwide on October 7-8. Those students are: Feiyang Bai, Aaron Wright, Jermel Watson, Johana Lopez, Christy Hill and Katie Kamara.

The students come from diverse academic backgrounds, with some majoring in computer science, civil engineering, nursing, psychology, social sciences, mechanical engineering and the arts.  

The NASA International Space Apps Challenge is described as “a hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, technologists and innovators worldwide to come together and use open data from NASA and its Space Agency Partners to create solutions to challenges on Earth and in space.” 

This year’s hackathon is the largest in the program’s history with more than 57,900 registered participants from 152 countries and territories who took on 30 challenges using free and open data from NASA and 13 Space Agency Partners. The theme was “Explore Open Science Together.”

“In my journey at UDC, I learned that challenges are opportunities in disguise. The encouragement and guidance from my professors and peers helped me navigate these challenges and emerge stronger,” said Lopez, a sophomore student. 

“I had a great time doing the hackathon this year. It was my first time doing something like that. The hosts at Optoro were very gracious in letting us congregate in their DC office. What I enjoyed most about the event was meeting other people who were interested in these sorts of things and collaborating on a project,” said Wright, a sophomore Information Technology major. 

UDC’s team won third place in the “Open Science Storytelling” challenge, which calls on participants to tell an open science success story creatively using any form of storytelling. Check out the final submission. 

Here is a sample of some of the other challenges in this year’s event:

“Be a Space Geologist” – In this challenge, participants are called on to use their imagination to show that geology doesn’t have to include fieldwork and in fact can be studied from space using a computer and NASA data. They are asked to create an app that allows geologists to use NASA’s Earth observation data to conduct research.

“Everything Starts With Water” – Participants are asked to create a visual tool so that students can better understand the complete path of water across the Earth and how its availability is affected by the changing climate.

“Immersed in the Sounds of Space” – In this challenge, participants must design a method to create “sonification,” which are translations of 2D astronomical data into sound. Using sonification of 3D NASA space data sets, which are two spatial dimensions and one color dimension, they must provide a different perceptual path to help people understand the wonders of the universe.  

“NASA in Your Neighborhood” – In this challenge, participants must look around their neighborhood or city and come up with a question about how the environment and humans are related. Then they must research the question using NASA satellites and information about people and present their findings in a creative way.