University of Regina students recognized by NASA for winning app challenge

WATCH: A group of U of R students were recognized by NASA for their submission into a Space Apps challenge. Angela Stewart has the story.

NASA has recognized 10 global winners in its 2024 Space App Challenge and a group of University of Regina students are among those victorious.

In just 24 hours, the team of four created a project called Asteroid Destroyer.

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“We took up the challenge for building a navigator for the Habitable World Observatory to be able to map and characterize exoplanets and be able to identify which they can send a probe to analyze it,” explained Sathyajit Loganathan, a member of the team.

The NASA Space Apps Challenge is an annual global competition that gives participants the opportunity to tackle challenges on Earth and in space.

The competition was held in Saskatoon earlier this month.

Almost 10,000 projects were submitted from all over the world and were judged by experts from NASA and other space agency partners.

“It feels great actually. Especially even CSA (Canadian Space Agency) recognized and posted about us on their social media. So that gave us some really well boosting confidence so that we can go further and participate in more competitions in future,” said Satyam Singh, another member of the team.

None of it would’ve been possible without the collaboration from each member.

“We have telescopes and telescopes can only look that way, and they can only measure the angle like that. So, one of my tasks was converting that into an X-Y-Z plane, so that these guys who were working on the front end … It’s better and more convenient for them to build out, like map out coordinates using that system,” team member Kapeesh Kaul explained.

“My role also entailed all the classifications based on what parameters we can classify exoplanets habitable or not.”

The team doesn’t have any NASA related projects on the go right now, but they hope to participate in future competitions, according to Loganathan.

“As we see human species progress and if there’s more realistic goals as everyone to achieve in [the] space arena or if everything moves forward faster, there’ll be more solutions to think about and solve.”