The International NASA Space Apps Challenge 2019 Hackathon returns to Romania for the fourth time. The 48-hour Hackathon will take place between October 19 and 20, 2019, in Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca and Craiova, alongside with other 200 cities around the world. Its main purpose is to link the data from NASA in a collaborative way with people from all over the world becoming involved in order to find solutions to these challenges.
Prospective participants may sign up on the page dedicated to each of the aforementioned cities: Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca andCraiova. Everyone is encouraged to participate, regardless of age. We are looking for creative people with problem-solving skills – school students, university students, professionals, beginners or experts with lifelong experience. Programmers, scientists, designers, storytellers, creators, builders, software specialists or science enthusiasts, they are all welcomed.
At this year’s edition, five generic topics are proposed and 25 specific ones are to be consulted within each category. The one called Oceans of the Earth aims to identify optimal solutions for their protection. The categories Our Moon, respectively the Planets, near and far proposetheir creative exploration. To the stars is inviting participants to juggle with science, art and technology, in order to discover the opportunities of outer space. The last category, Living in our world, emphasizes the elements that allow us to exist on Earth and highlights the creative projects that illustrate the cohesions within this ecosystem.
“Certainly, the Space remains to this day an exceptionally challenging subject, not only for us, adults, but for the young ones as well. That is the reason why the fourth edition of the Space Apps Hackathon makes us so enthusiastic and curious to discover new creative and innovative teams. We feel a huge satisfaction with Romanian teams’ progress so far, one of them qualifying in 2018 in the global finals of the Hackathon. The themes are very appealing and permissive, so we expect to be received with the same enthusiasm by the participants and obtain exquisite results to this edition as well”, declared Cristian Dascălu, founder of Digital Transformers.
The Hackathon participants will have access to free instruments, offered on a global scale by Neustar, Google and Sentinel Hub that are consisting of cloud computing services, domain names and GIS platform access.
SpaceApps Challenge is an innovating NASA incubation program, organized annually, starting with 2012 in hubs from all over the world. In the 2018 edition, more than 18.000 participants from 75 countries signed up, whereas Romania had 300 participants. In the 2018
edition, 8 romanian finalist teams were elected on a national level, and the team from Cluj became one of the internationally elected teams for the „Galactic Impact” category.
