More than 93,000 participants registered from 163 countries around the world to take on one of 21 different challenges launched by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) together with 15 partner space agencies. These are the first key figures of the NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2024, the largest annual hackathon on the planet entirely dedicated to space and science, which this year took place between Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 October.
In Italy, in parallel to the local editions in Rome, Naples and Venice, the competition was also held in Turin, hosted by the Innovative Companies Incubator of Politecnico di Torino (I3P) in collaboration with the ESA BIC Turin incubation program. The hackathon's international partners included the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI), with which I3P has been collaborating for years to support the birth and growth of start-ups in the space sector.
Taking up the invitation to try their hand at the initiative's challenges, very varied in terms of themes and objectives, were 58 participants, of many different nationalities and educational backgrounds, who filled I3P's Agorà Hall with their curiosity, inventiveness and resourcefulness.
The hackathon does not necessarily require purely technical studies, on the contrary: along with engineers, programmers and astrophysicists, designers, communicators and illustrators took part, each bringing their skills to the table in order to work as a team on a common project.
The Turin hackathon officially started at 4 PM on Saturday and continued uninterruptedly for 24 hours, including the night, until the delivery of the projects to the local organisers, the pitch of the 13 elaborated solutions before the evaluation jury, and the award ceremony for the most promising teams, which could one day evolve into real innovative start-uppers.
The local evaluation jury was composed of:
Leo Italiano, Senior Consultant at I3P & Program Manager of ESA BIC Turin;
Tania Gres, Space Exploration System Engineer representing the sponsor Thales Alenia Space;
Alessandro Ruggiero Chiminelli, Planetary Exploration Robotics Engineer at Thales Alenia Space;
Gianpaolo Macario, Software Architect representing the sponsor Center for Near Space (part of the Italian Institute for the Future);
Gianfranco Poncini, Automotive Engineer & Microelectronics Expert at Center for Near Space;
Giacomo Martinotti, Vice President of Distretto Aerospaziale Piemonte (DAP).
The start-up Kurs Orbital, supported by I3P and ESA BIC Turin, also participated in the hackathon as a partner, providing its Head of Communications, Roberto Morano, as an expert mentor for the teams of participants.
The overall first prize of the local hackathon in Turin was won by the team Three Buddy Problem, composed by six members: Ismet Kaan Yilmaz, Ismail Emre Unlu, Kaan Yilmaz, Elnaz Bozorgzadeh, Mert Özcan and Ipek Ogretmenoglu. The team chose the challenge entitled "Chronicles of Exoplanet Exploration", which proposed embarking on a journey to revolutionise exoplanet education, and devised an interactive game, "Exoplanet Quest", which combines artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) to provide an immersive educational experience.
The group of young creators was awarded a prize worth 1,000 euros sponsored by Thales Alenia Space and a live tour of the sponsor's facilities in Turin.
On the second step of the podium was the team named AgroMind AI, author of a technological solution to help farmers in response to the challenge "Leveraging Earth Observation Data for Informed Agricultural Decision-Making". The five team members - Iftekhar Anwar, Amir Mohammad Farhang, Harsimran Singh, Enrico Catalano and Rida Ben Hassi - described the project: "Our web app transforms how farmers interact with their land. Using advanced APIs, satellite data, and predictive analytics, we empower farmers to analyze their land’s health, predict disasters, and optimize their crops – all with a few clicks".
The team won the second prize of the Turin hackathon, sponsored directly by I3P for an economic value of 500 euros, with the opportunity to undertake a free pre-incubation path to further develop the project and possibly, one day, join the ESA BIC Turin community of innovators.
For the "Next Possible Future" special award, the sponsor Center for Near Space (CNS) chose the Space Edu team, consisting of four Aerospace Engineering students from Politecnico di Milano: Sofia Montacchini, Davide Mereghetti, Camilla Martino and Christian Muslih. The team tackled the challenge "PACE in the Classroom" - referring to NASA's PACE mission, an acronym for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem - and developed a web project: a website capable of explaining and making the mission more accessible, to encourage in-depth study also through an interactive game.
According to the judgement of the examiners from CNS, "the team demonstrated particular communication skills and a strong desire to translate the proposed scientific topics into concepts that can be easily assimilated by a young audience", and it could foster a collaboration with the Italian Institute for the Future to work together in this direction.
Now the Space Apps 2024 competition continues on an international level. The teams nominated by each host location of the hackathon will be evaluated by the "Global Judges": the best projects will be selected as "Global Finalists" and scrutinised by a jury formed by NASA and the initiative's main partner space agencies, with the aim of announcing the "Global Winners" in January 2025.
At the end of the two-day event, I3P thanked all the participants, as well as all the mentors, jurors and sponsors of the hackathon, who had passionately collaborated in the success of the event, always in the hope of having ignited the spark behind the creation of new entrepreneurial ventures in the growing Space Economy sector.
