A team of Unicamp students won the challenge for the first time international Space App Challenge, promoted annually by NASA, the United States space agency. In the most recent edition of the event, there was 57.999 registrants from 152 countries. The marathon of activities proposed by the agency encourages competitors to seek innovative solutions in order to improve life both on Earth and in space. In total, ten projects were awarded in different categories.
The University team – called Greetings from Earth – was formed by Computer Engineering students Andreas Cisi Ramos, Bruno Amaral Teixeira de Freitas, Bernardo Panka Archegas, Naim Shaikhzadeh Santos and Felipe Gabriel Brabes da Silva, as well as by Daniel Yuji Hosomi, from Computer Science. The group developed a immersive website who teaches an inhabitant of a distant planet about the importance of the oceans for life on Earth.
The prize will be a visit to NASA headquarters in Washington DC and the Goddard Space Flight Center, in the USA, where the James Webb telescope was born. The visit was scheduled for June 5th and 6th.
The students say that their mission was to create a narrative emphasizing the primary importance of the oceans in the life of our planet, with emphasis on phytoplankton. The messages sent to the alien user include graphics, 3D models, satellite images and a question and answer game, all created based on data made available by the North American agency. The idea is to allow the alien to see the oceans not just as vast expanses of water, but as the planet's gardens, responsible for regulating Earth's climate and nurturing various forms of life.
“As the team organizer, it was a great pleasure to have won this competition, especially being alongside colleagues that I admire so much,” said Freitas. “We knew the project had potential, but we didn’t imagine we would be champions. The feeling of having won translated into extreme happiness, especially because our work won in a category that highlights the project with the greatest potential to improve life on Earth”, he added.
"It hasn't sunk in yet that we managed to be one of the 10 winners and that I will have the opportunity to visit the United States for the first time,” said Andreas Cisi. “I believe that this experience will be invaluable, opening significant doors for my future as a developer and also from my colleagues. Furthermore, it is an immense satisfaction, considering my great interest in game development, to see a minigame that I developed be part of a successful project", he added.
An engineer and computer scientist graduated from Unicamp and a Space Apps volunteer since 2019, Marco Linhares says that, andn November, the group was classified for the final stage of the competition, gaining a place among the 40 best projects in the world.
The definitive result came out on the 23rd of this month, and the team made up of students from the Computing Institute (IC) and the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Feec) at Unicamp won in the category Galactic Impact: the Project with the Greatest Potential to Improve Life on Planet Earth or the Universe.
“This is something fantastic, right? This is the biggest competition in the area in the world involving young people as protagonists. I hope this performance inspires many other young people”, said Linhares, a master’s student at Feec.
Space Quest Maidens
In addition to the group of Unicamp students, a team from Campinas, the Space Quest Maidens (space mission maidens), composed of students Samara Santos, Sara Lima, Kezia Souza, Jennifer Leite and Larissa Santos, also won the world stage of the competition in Most Inspirational category – the Project that Captivated Our Heart. The team, made up entirely of girls, developed an interactive educational tool to teach children about the mechanics of eclipses.
The NASA challenge also awarded work from students from Taiwan, Peru, the United States, Tajikistan, Ukraine and Bangladesh.
