Space Apps COVID-19 Hackathon Brings 15,000 People Together to Address Pandemic Challenges

Partners: NASA, Booz Allen Hamilton, Mindgrub

This year, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge brought together 15,000 people from 150 countries to create solutions. On May 30-31, the world’s largest global hackathon sparked more than 1,400 solutions to COVID-19-related challenges. Technologists, artists, designers, covers, students, entrepreneurs and others participated, engaging with NASA’s open data to develop solutions to 12 challenge areas related to the pandemic.

As a founder of NASA’s Space Apps Challenge, SecondMuse has welcomed and supported the global community alongside NASA since 2012. During this time, unconventional approaches have lent fresh insight, inspiration, and solutions to difficult problems.

“Our experience with other Space Apps Challenges is helping us distill the problems people across the world are facing as a result of the pandemic into accessible language to then empower participants to address these problems by working in small teams and prototyping solutions,” said Todd Khozein, Founder of SecondMuse.

NASA’s incredible body of unique Earth observation data was used by participants across 2000+ teams, 24 chat channels, and six languages to solve for 12 key challenges, including:

• Documenting the local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19 and the associated societal responses.
• Exploring how human activity and regional land-based human movement patterns may have shifted in response to COVID-19.
• Examining any potential impacts of reduced human traffic in such local protected natural environments
• Looking at the current and ongoing change in the monitoring indicators of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
• Identifying patterns between population density and COVID-19 cases and identifying factors that could help predict hotspots of disease spread.
• Integrating various Earth Observation-derived features with available socio-economic data to discover or enhance our understanding of COVID-19 impacts.
• Read more about all 12 challenges here.

Since its founding in 2012, we’ve seen the Space Apps community grow from 2,000 people in 25 locations on 7 continents and the International Space Station to where it is today. After this latest iteration, a series of judges and partners will evaluate the 1,400 project submissions to select six winners from across the globe. The collaboration across borders, sectors, and cultures as paradigm-shifting solutions are developed truly reflects the creative spirit of the challenge. We can’t wait for the next challenge on October 2-4, 2020!

What is Space Apps?

Now in its 9th year, Space Apps is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space. Space Apps 2019 included over 29,000 participants at 225 events in 71 countries. Space Apps is a NASA-led initiative organized in collaboration with Booz Allen Hamilton, Mindgrub, and SecondMuse.

Space Apps 2020 will still be coming to you on October 2-4, 2020. You can apply to host a local event by clicking the link here.