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HackAthlone 2026

13 to 15 Nov 2026
TUS Athlone

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Free. You’ll register on spaceappschallenge.org and choose Athlone as your local event.

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NASA Space Apps 2026 challenge

Planet X and SPHEREx

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Subjects: Astrophysics · Planets & Moons · Software

Illustration of the SPHEREx spacecraft above Earth, set against a detailed cosmic background.
Image: NASA Space Apps Challenge

Summary

Since 2025, NASA’s SPHEREx mission has been mapping the entire sky every six months in 102 bands of near-infrared light, returning images of more than a billion objects. Comets, asteroids, stars, brown dwarfs, and even new planets reveal themselves by shifting position between images, but no one person can sift through all that data alone. Your challenge is to create a public-facing web tool to display images of the sky from SPHEREx mission, making it easy for anyone to quickly see how they change over time.

The full challenge statement, with its data and resources, is published on 28 October. Until then, you can read this summary, talk it over with your team and plan, but the Space Apps rules say no work on the project itself before the hackathon starts.

From the NASA Space Apps Challenge. The official page is the final word on this challenge.