Update: The Popeye on Mars project came first in "Best Mission Concept" category. Congrats guys!

During the weekend of 20th and 21st of April we gathered at hackerpace.gr and started hacking for NASA's space apps challenge. From their webpage:

The International Space Apps Challenge is an international mass collaboration focused on space exploration that takes place over 48-hours in cities around the world. The event embraces collaborative problem solving with a goal of producing relevant open-source solutions to address global needs applicable to both life on Earth and life in space. NASA is leading this global collaboration along with a number of additional government collaborators and 100+ local partner organizations.

16 people, 2 teams, 2 days, 2 globally nominated projects: popeye on mars and anapNEO. See here some photos. Thank you mozilla for all the pizzas and souvlakia :)

Popeye on Mars

Our solution is a deployable, reusable spinach greenhouse for Mars. Internally, a fully equipped aeroponic system operates for ~45 days, having all the needed resources, sensors and electronic systems to stabilize the internal environment and help the spinach growth. Also, there are systems for harvesting produced oxygen during the process and the plants at the end of it. Externally, photovoltaic panels provide power, while several cover layers protect the system against Mars extreme conditions.

• Project page
• Video

anapNEO

anapNEO is a web app build on Django and HTML, CSS, JS that enables the submission and ranking of NEO findings. Focused on UX simplicity and streamlining of the registration and submission process, a user signs up easily using Persona, and creates a user account (with basic information). She then lands on a (public too!) Dashboard that displays all latest submissions and can submit a new finding. You can also vote on findings affecting the score and (yet to implement) expose those on an API.

• Project page
• Video