How to choose a Space Apps challenge

Road to HackAthlone: 31 days to go

Every team in the NASA Space Apps Challenge works on one challenge, and that choice shapes your whole weekend. The 14 challenge summaries for 2026 have been live on spaceappschallenge.org since 17 September. Our challenges page lists them all, with a link to each official page.

You don’t have to decide today. The full challenge statements arrive on 28 October. A shortlist now makes that day much easier.

Find the verb in each summary

Every summary ends with a sentence that starts “Your challenge is to”. The verb that follows tells you what you’ll have to show the judges on Sunday.

• Tell a story. Abandoned but not Forgotten asks you to tell the story of NASA hardware left on the Moon, on Mars and in deep space, for school-age space fans.
• Make a game. Space Mission Design Game and Build a Junior Astronaut Mission Trainer both ask for interactive games about the decisions behind a mission.
• Build a tool. CLPS Lunar Mission Browser wants a tool to compare Moon landing sites and dates. Field Shift wants a decision-support tool to help farmers plan crop rotations.
• Analyse data. Be An Earth System Trend Detective! asks you to find variables measured by NASA missions, show how they change over time and decide whether the change is “significant”.
• Turn data into sound. The Earth Information Jukebox pairs visuals from NASA’s Earth Information Center with sound generated in real time.

A team of storytellers and a team of data scientists should probably not pick the same challenge.

Check the level tags

Each challenge page carries level tags: Beginner/Youth, Intermediate and Advanced. Some challenges, like The Earth Information Jukebox and Space Mission Design Game, are tagged Beginner/Youth as well as Intermediate. Others, like Planet X and SPHEREx, are tagged Advanced only.

Treat the tags as a guide, not a rule. A beginner team can take on an advanced challenge if it keeps the scope small. Just go in knowing that’s what you’re doing.

Match the challenge to the people you have

List your team’s skills honestly, including the ones that aren’t code. Then look for a challenge that uses most of them.

Subject knowledge counts as much as programming. An agriculture student will read the Field Shift summary differently from a computer science student. Someone who has studied physiology will spot things in the astronaut health monitoring challenge that others miss. A geography or geology student has a head start on the challenge to find places on Earth that resemble the Moon and Mars.

If you’re still building your team, say which challenge you’re leaning towards. It helps the right people find you.

Make sure you can get the data

This step is easy to skip, and skipping it hurts on Saturday. A challenge you love is no use if you can’t open its data.

Some summaries already name their data source. Dancing with the SARs uses radar data from the NASA-ISRO NISAR mission. Planet X and SPHEREx uses images of the sky from NASA’s SPHEREx mission. Harmonization of MODIS and VIIRS Hot Spots works with fire detections from two different satellite sensors. The full statements on 28 October will list the resources for every challenge.

When you see the data links, check four things:

• You can download the data without special software or a paid account.
• Someone on your team can open the file format.
• It’s small enough to work with on shared Wi-Fi, or you can take a smaller sample.
• It covers the place and the time period you care about.

Much of NASA’s Earth data needs a free Earthdata Login account to download, so register for one early. Our technical post next Tuesday covers where to find data and how to start.

Think about Sunday first

Picture your demo before you commit. It might be a map that updates, a game someone can play or a story built from real images. In 2025, each team had 3 minutes to present to our judges. If you can’t imagine what you’d show in that time, the challenge may be too big for one weekend.

Space Apps is realistic about this. Its Team Formation Guide says participants “are not expected to submit a fully developed project at the end”. Pick a challenge where a small, working slice would still make sense.

Keep a local angle in mind

Most Earth observation data is global, so you can often point it at home. In 2025, Cea-SAR used satellite radar to study flooding on the Shannon and took first place. A local angle won’t win on its own, but it makes your problem real to the people in the room.

Shortlist, don’t marry

Pick two or three challenges now, not one. The full statements may change your mind, and that’s fine: a Team Owner can switch the team’s challenge on spaceappschallenge.org later. Each team works on only one challenge in the end, and Space Apps encourages you to settle on it before the hackathon starts.

Browse all 14 on our challenges page.