Interesting NASA App Challenges

04/19/13 23:31:00    

By Michael Mealling

I attended the kick off session of Atlanta's NASA Apps Challenge this evening. Prior to the meeting I ran through a few of the proposed challenges and a few piqued my interest:

1) ArduSat - Extend the functionality of ArduSat - an open satellite platform offering on-demand access to Space, and built on the Arduino chip set. Engage people with ArduSat via an application that utilizes its camera, the development of a global weather dataset, or improve ArduSat's processing power.

2) Hitch A Ride to Mars - Create a CubeSat design and develop a mission that operates in the Mars environment and furthers our knowledge of Mars. (The EDL and power challenges are considerable.)

3) Bootstrapping of Space Industry - Isn't this what we're doing?

4) CubeSats for Asteroid Exploration - Consider ways you could use a CubeSat to provide more information about an asteroid, such as developing a cubesat based sensor package that can be used to impact an asteroid and send back information about the minerals inside.

5) Asteroid Occultation App - combine multiple amateur observations to identify asteroid trajectories