Wake Up Neo: Belarusian IT project finalist at NASA’s Space Apps Challenge

Belarusian IT project ‘Wake Up NEO…’ intended to save the world from a collision with an asteroid has hit Top 5 best in the People’s choice category of the prestigious Space Apps Challenge.

On April 22-24, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) gathered programmers and UI-designers, physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, and robotics engineers to find innovative solutions to the global challenges using an open API. Space Apps Challenge was hosted by the HTP business incubator and was attended by over 200 people.

Popular vote which lasted the whole week and ended at 21:00 on Sunday, but was  extended for  4 hours, brought ‘Wake Up NEO…’ to  the Top 5.

“Billions of asteroids surrounds us every day. We don’t want to share the fate of dinosaurs <…> Our idea was to help with classifying unclassified asteroids and identifying lost asteroids. We investigated 2 different approaches: identifying asteroids using light curve data and classification by neural network with revealing of correlation between parameters used in object’s orbit calculation,” the authors describe their idea.

Among the leading projects are MarsHopper (a plane for investigation of Mars poles and its surroundings), Avis (a solution that involves a smart wristband and an Android app to help drone operators control the drone, notify them about weather and near no-fly zones) and Martian Oasis ( a game that simulates conditions in an off-Earth located permanent or temporary colony).

belsat.eu following dev.by