On the 5th and 6th of October, the Cosmic Pathways’ team, composed by Filipe Gaio, Henrique Fernandes, Miguel Cabral and Rodrigo Silva, all L.EIC students, were the big winners of the Nasa Space Apps Challenge – the world’s biggest hackathon, at one of the local events that this year focused on the Sun’s influence on the Earth as its motto.
The competition challenges participants to collaboratively develop solutions to current issues related to Earth and space using open NASA data.
The two-day event was held both as a global online competition and at local face-to-face events around the world. In Portugal, one of the local events took place in Lisbon, organised by the Atlântica – Instituto Universitário, in partnership with Oeiras Valley, Unicorn Factory Lisboa, Active Space Technologies, CEIIA, Ordem dos Engenheiros, AMSAT-CT, where the L.EIC team won 1st place.
Encouraging new audiences to develop a passion for astronomy and the universe was the mission of “Cosmic Pathways”, which developed the project “Symphony of the Stars: Harmonising the James Webb Space Telescope in Music and Images”. The mission focused on creating a website with a 3D model of the universe, using a representation of the solar system as a reference. In this model, they were able to find different points that were highlighted from the rest to represent images taken by the JWST. Throughout the experience, the user is surrounded by original music, and clicking on each of these images would play a sound effect/musical excerpt generated from the image itself.
Although they explored a number of image-to-audio conversion techniques, they ultimately decided to create their own music, inspired by 3 images they found particularly compelling that were captured by the JWST.
The team received a scholarship for Atlântica’s training offer, with 80% of the amount covered by the institution; from Active Space Technologies, support for the development of the Cosmic Pathways project, mentoring in the development of an end of course project, a summer internship at the company and a visit to the facilities in Coimbra; and from the Municipality of Oeiras, participation in the next Science Fair. Group members will also have the opportunity to participate in the Science Hub podcast, be interviewed about the project – which will be published on the NASA Space Apps page – and compete for the Global Award with mentoring from NASA Space.
Read the testimonies of our winners:
“There are very few opportunities where I can combine two of my passions, making music and programming, and as soon as I saw this opportunity I didn’t want to let it go! After building a team and putting our ideas into action, despite the 3 hours of sleep during the hackathon, we all left with the feeling that we had done our duty and with our hearts full, not only because we had won the hackathon, but also because we were proud of the ‘end product’ we had created. It was undoubtedly an enriching experience to take part in a hackathon that stimulated our creative side and gave us the freedom to design our project from scratch.” – Filipe Gaio
“It was the first time I participated in a hackathon and it was an excellent experience. Although it was a very intense weekend, with very little time to sleep, it was worth it because not only did we learn new technologies to build the project, but we also attended lectures on space exploration, presentation techniques and business models given by experts in the field.”- Henrique Fernandes
“For as long as I can remember I’ve had a huge interest in the universe, and with this incredible competition I had the chance to bring together two things that can sometimes seem so different. The activity was very well organised, always trying to bring the participants closer to each other, as well as enriching educational talks. In short, a well-developed project that allows participants to work and develop something they can be proud of and where creativity can be unleashed.” – Miguel Cabral
‘” It was an incredible experience. I’d never taken part in a competition like this before and I really enjoyed it. It was two days of great fun but also a lot of work to complete as much of the project as possible. In the end, I was proud of the final product and the team’s performance and, of course, very happy that the effort paid off and we won first place.” – Rodrigo Coelho