Challenges | Observe

Observation is critical to gathering the scientific and technical knowledge needed to take action. Space-based technologies, especially Earth-observing satellites, have given us a greater understanding of Earth and allowed us to probe into the depths of space. Challenges in this category will ask you to devise tools that make observation data more accessible for use by scientists, decision-makers, and the public.

A One Health Approach

Air pollution is a major global environmental health risk, causing an estimated seven million deaths across the globe annually. Your challenge is to take an interdisciplinary approach, using both Earth science and health science, and integrate different types of datasets and applications to study the effects of air pollution.

Scanning for Lifeforms

This challenge addresses a pressing global need to track change in biological diversity, which is threatened by human-driven environmental change. Use space agency data to develop innovative ways to detect biological diversity on Earth, track and predict changes over time, and communicate that information to scientists and society.

Hey! What Are You Looking At?

The High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) and the Canadian Astronomy Data Center (CADC) archive space agencies' data from missions studying electromagnetic radiation from extremely energetic cosmic phenomena (e.g., gravitational wave detections, gamma ray bursts, and supernovae). Your challenge is to create a visualization tool that can help people interested in these phenomena to access the data quickly and easily.

Home Planet at Your Fingertips

Develop a user-friendly application or tool to discover, visualize, and analyze NASA Earth data for monitoring our home planet.