The numbers stack up to a formidable challenge.
A total of 15,444 teams from 163 countries entered nearly 10,000 projects in the NASA Space Apps Challenge, but only 10 projects would win, and a Western project was one of them.
The WMPGang, a team made up of four graduate students from the department of physics and astronomy, won the Best Use of Science Award in the annual NASA competition, a hackathon for coders, scientists and other innovators, held at 485 events in cities around the world.
Maximilian Vovk, Dakota Cecil, Ian Chow and Simon Van Schuylenbergh created the SkyShield app over the course of 30 hours at the event in Waterloo, Ont. in October 2024.
"None of us had any experience with web development," said Chow. "But we managed to build a genuinely useful app, in under two days, starting from scratch with almost no prior knowledge of web development."
A Western team of graduate students, Ian Chow, Simon Van Schuylenbergh, Maximilian Vovk and Dakota Cecil, won the Best Use of Science Award in the NASA Space Apps Challenge. At the annual hackathon held in cities across the world, coders and innovators devise solutions to the pressing challenges humanity faces, both on Earth and in space. (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications)
What they did have was a solid knowledge of astronomy, and an aptitude for learning quickly to create an orrery - a model of the solar system so named for the first mechanical model presented to the 4th Earl of Orrery, Charles Boyle, in 1713. An orrery app was one of 20 challenges NASA presented to event participants.
The team met the challenge by creating a 3D orrery app that uses real data to identify both threats to space infrastructure and Earth. The SkyShield app allows users to visualize and explore the solar system.
The competition required the app to be an interactive webpage capable of showing the movements of celestial bodies including the planets, near-Earth asteroids, near-Earth comets and potentially hazardous asteroids. The team members took the challenge one step further by addressing what they consider to be an often-overlooked threat.
Space infrastructure at risk
"NASA was looking to show the importance of asteroids," said team leader, Maximilian Vovk. "I thought it was a good idea to raise another important aspect - the potential risks of meteoroids. We thought it could be crucial to win."
"The smaller meteoroid particles are not usually considered because they are very small," added Cecil. "But they can still pose a serious danger to astronauts or space infrastructure. For example, the James Webb Space Telescope was struck by a meteoroid, slightly damaging one of its mirrors shortly after it was launched. That's why we highlighted meteoroids, from meteoroid streams or sporadic sources."
Meteoroid particles travel at hypervelocity averaging 10 kilometres per second (36,000 km/hour), fast enough to potentially injure an astronaut.
"Even a small speck could puncture an astronaut's spacesuit," said Vovk.
"Near-earth objects and asteroids get a lot of media buzz - nobody wants to end up like the dinosaurs. But meteoroids can also be dangerous to the hundreds of billions of dollars in space infrastructure including satellites and the International Space Station. Those assets are critical for scientific missions, the military and telecommunication. Every one of them is at risk of being damaged by meteoroids." - Ian Chow, member of Western team that won the NASA Space Apps Challenge
The Space Apps Challenge is intended to engage a global community in developing solutions for the challenges humanity faces on Earth and in space. Participants had access to free and open data from NASA and its space agency partners.
SkyShield incorporates that data for real-time orbit plotting of 1,669 near-Earth objects (NEOs), plus meteoroid streams and sporadic meteoroid distribution, along with eight planets and five dwarf planets. Custom filtering is included to narrow what's displayed to the users' desired parameters.
The app was named one of 40 finalists in the contest in November 2024. Two months later, a committee of subject matter experts from NASA and space agency partners judged SkyShield as the project that made the best and most valid use of science and the scientific method.
"It's a pretty incredible product," said physics and astronomy professor Peter Brown, a member of the Western Institute for Earth and Space Exploration. "It's a testament to their collective experience and knowing what datasets to look at and how to pull it all together into an appealing package that's easy to use. It makes visualizing asteroids and meteoroids really interesting."
Team members said that their knowledge of astronomy and physics coupled with an eagerness to "just Google everything we don't know" helped them create the app so quickly. They also prepared for the event with last-minute cramming.
"Two weeks before, I started making my own HTML websites," said Van Schuylenbergh. "That gave us a bit of knowledge for doing the visual user interface. It also saved us time we needed out of the 30 hours or so we had."
Artificial intelligence was also a time saver. They used ChatGPT to speed up debugging and create HTML templates.
Cecil understood the math required to plot the orbits in three-dimensional space, a skill he learned in a planetary science course at Western last year.
"I had programmed before, but never with JavaScript," said Cecil. "Two days prior to the event, I started to learn the language."
Unique entry in NASA Space Apps Challenge
Among the teams in the final 40, five made orrery apps.
"Most orreries focus on planets and maybe a handful of other things, and if they show any asteroid orbits at all, it's usually just one at a time," said Cecil. "Our shows a whole bunch of them together and they can be filtered by selecting ones that present higher risk, for example, or the ones that have eccentric orbits."
NASA emphasizes the hackathon events are much more than a competition - they're also an opportunity for participants to learn from each other. The four did discover the pressure brought out the best of their group dynamics.
"Being in the same room doing the coding, we really got into the zone," said Chow. "Each of us worked on our own, but we also passed tasks between us and helped each other when we were having problems. Working together as an efficient team was key to creating a usable app."
The team hopes SkyShield will be embraced as a practical teaching tool. They are now working toward its adoption as an instructional tool for students in an undergraduate astronomy course at Western.
"We envision the app mostly for educational purposes," said Chow. "The sporadic meteoroid component of the app is based on current established science and the most recent version of the meteoroid environment around Earth that NASA uses in its mission planning."
While looking to SkyShield's potential as a teaching aid, the team is also pleased with the chance to get more people interested in the solar system.
"For now," Vovk said, "We are just happy to be able to share an app we're proud of with the community."
