NASA Contest Winners Offer Microclimate Data on Earth and Spinach on Mars
By
Joseph Marks
International Space Apps winners hailed from Kansas City, Philadelphia, Athens and London.
The “galactic impact” winner of NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge crowd sources micro-climate data, using volunteers and low-cost sensors, to give a much richer portrait of weather patterns across a city.
The NASA Greener Cities Project, produced by a team of developers from Gothenburg, Sweden, has the greatest “potential to significantly improve life on earth or in the universe,” the Space Apps challenge organizers said in a blog post Wednesday.
Other winners of NASA’s second space apps challenge held April 20 and 21 include:
- Popeye on Mars, a greenhouse capable of surviving Martian weather conditions that harvests not just spinach to eat but the oxygen that spinach produces.
- ISS Base Station, a mechanical arm that points to the current location of the International Space Station and iOS software that shows the station on a map.
- Sol, an app that offers the daily weather report from Mars.
All the apps were built with open data provided by NASA.