Over the past weekend (20th to the 21st of October) I participated in the NASA Space Apps Challenge, an international 48 hours hackathon in which participants can used open-data to solve problems given by NASA. It is an adult-only event, however Acorn Aspirations petitioned and allowed thirty or so teens to compete- the only teen participants in the world. All across the world people worked either on their own or on teams to create a projects which they would then upload to the Space Apps Website to be judged. The teen hack took place at the Microsoft Reactor, London.
My team and I worked on OzoneWatch- a website that tracks upcoming launches on a map (including name of the rocket, details about the launch, and a picture of the rocket) to compare with a map of the ozone to see the effect of rockets on the ozone. This was our second idea- we changed from our original idea after being told we should ideally use more NASA provided data. Our original idea was to track upcoming launches for people (we focused on students) in countries which didn’t have their own space program. Students could submit their (science) project idea to be run in space using a CubeSat (a type of miniaturized satellite for space research). CubeSats are very expensive, so the second part of the website would be dedicated toward crowd-funding the submitted project ideas (in order to fund their journey into space).
On the Sunday, my group and I pitched in front of a panel of judges. In the end, we ended up winning lunch with Microsoft which should be cool.
Us pitching OzoneWatch
Licence To Code 