NASA’s Space Apps Challenge, its open innovation incubator, will take place April 23-24 across the planet. This year there will be local events taking place simultaneously in 193 locations spanning 72 countries. It’s the first year this massive collaboration comes to the Washington DC metro region!

Participants are asked to develop mobile applications, software, hardware, data visualizations and platform solutions that could contribute to space exploration missions and help improve life on Earth. This year, NASA is offering 26 challenges in six mission-related categories: Aeronautics, Earth, International Space Station, Journey to Mars, Solar System and Beyond, and Space Technology. More than 200 sources, including data sets, services and tools, will be available to challenge participants, which include techy-savvy citizens, scientists, entrepreneurs, educators, families and students to help solve problems and questions relevant to space exploration and broader subjects that impact life on Earth.

Challenges: spaceappschallenge.org/challenges

Space Apps is one of the most challenging, innovative, and most importantly, inclusive and collaborative hackathons around. Every year teams across industries, cities, cultures, languages, and time come together for these 2 days to discover and solve problems affecting us all as citizens of our planet, our solar system, and beyond.

For DC metro participants, the hackathon will be held at TechShop DC-Arlington, a fantastic maker-space located minutes from the Crystal City metro stop. You can join a team or work individually, and you will share your project with local judges for the chance at an award and to move forward to global judging. At global judging, teams have the opportunity to win an invitation to a NASA launch event and to be featured on open.NASA’s Innovation Space (open.nasa.gov/innovation-space).

For your work to count for global juding you must register with NASA

• Technical
  Does the project address the challenge in a new, clever way? Which state of maturity does the project represent?
• Impact
  Does the project have potential to bring change? Could the project plausibly shift behavior? Does the project address environmental issues? Could the project advance the sate of technology?
• Storytelling
  Is the team or solver telling the solution's story well? Is that story attention ­grabbing, authentic and passionate? Does the story provide context or does a reviewer need to refer to documentation to understand?