Space Apps Challenge: students have 48 hours to develop applications using space data.

Article courtesy of: https://spaceq.ca/space-apps-challenge-bring-in-more-than-425-canadian-participants/

One of the first place winners is Rome Ramos, Son of Emil Ramos a co-founder of IRIS!

Canadian space geeks came together during a weekend earlier this month (Oct. 19 to 21) to hack, chat and create space apps that got the attention of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and NASA.

More than 425 participants across the country took place in the 2018 International Space Apps Challenge, which uses space-based open data for applications that can be used on Earth. NASA had six challenges open and for the second consecutive year, the CSA had its own open data challenges for Canadians, too. These Canadian ones included:

• Bio-monitoring data related to David Saint-Jacques’ Expedition 58-59 mission (rumoured to launch in early December);
• Earth observations from RADARSAT-1 and RADARSAT-2 (in collaboration with Natural Resources Canada);
• Climate change data from SCISAT and OSIRIS (Optical Spectrograph and InfraRed Imaging System) on the Odin satellite;
• Aurora data from THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms);
• Asteroid information from the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat).

CSA experts were also on hand all weekend to answer questions, through a dedicated Slack channel for participants – who came from the cities of Edmonton, Winnipeg, Kitchener-Waterloo, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Finalists were selected from each city and will have the chance to speak virtually with one of Canada’s four astronauts.