aerospaceresearch-blog

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The NASA Space Apps Stuttgart 2015 Hackathon winner BigWhoop is a finalist for the NASA Global People’s Choice Award!

The NASA Space Application Challenge 2015: one hackathon weekend, 133 cities around the world, 949 projects, and our BigWhoop project is among the final 15 for the global People’s Choice Award. Read on to learn what happened during the event at the Stuttgart hackerspace shackspace and then go on and vote for BigWhoop and make it win the award!

NASA’s Space Apps Challenge is an international mass collaboration/hackathon organized on a global scale and held in all major cities worldwide, with a focus on finding solutions to challenges faced in space exploration and also to life on Earth.

The Winner of the Stuttgart chapter of Global NASA Space Apps Challenge is BigWhoop. BigWhoop addresses the “Open Source Air Traffic Tracking” Challenge. This challenge required the building of a tool that allowed users to select a particular flight and see its out-the-window or other views of the aircraft, and airspace. We decided to extend the scope of the project a bit. Our app was designed as a global sensor grid to measure the whole radio spectrum -thus  making air traffic monitoring a subset of the solution. This free and community driven approach based on small and low-cost software defined radio devices earned the local team a global nomination for NASA’s People’s Choice Awards and will be competing to be among the final 15 out of 949 projects for global People’s Choice awards. And now you can vote for the Stuttgart Team as of 27 April.

Just visit this page and vote for our #BigWhoop app (once a day).

Watch the Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL-lXf3kTWgqzmuL1gUb1QfBmIw6BnqXCw&v=GnamC7pU1Ok

All this was possible because we started early. We had a kick-off event in February to give people the opportunity to meet, find a challenge to tackle and prepare it before the official Space Apps hackathon weekend during the 10th to 12th April. Having an early launch event was one of the results of our first Space Apps in 2012 and it worked out beautifully. A two day hackathon is great to pitch an idea, but we wanted to show a working project. From sensor nodes that can be deployed at hundreds of locations worldwide to the processed data ready to be analyzed on a map. It also made it possible to include interested people as virtual participants. Three BigWhoop team members come from Bolivia, Poland and the UK respectively and they already knew the goals of the project and provided essential parts to the project via Skype and GitHub. This already made our project feel global and important for everybody. You can still join BigWhoop, just get our code and start using it!

The hackathon was great to knit the team even tighter and add last minute additions.  The support of random people at shackspace was also a big factor. People not even on the team overheard us discussing project details and simply joined ad-hoc and contributed their solution. This lead to the music arrangement you listen to during our video presentation and “node zero”, the very first node of our sensor grid now working on a virtual machine in shackspace’s experimental datacenter is not just producing data but also responsible to collect data from everyone contributing to the grid.

Ultimately BigWhoop is intended to run on the Constellation computation grid with 60,000 computers. However, we started a pre-alpha test. So we asked for your help during the hackathon weekend to plug in your software defined radio devices and start a sensor node for us. Our BigWhoop software was already able to send this to our server at shackspace and we received data from nice people in Virginia, US and Bremen, Germany. With this help, we were able to show you a first live demo at the end of the hackathon. Since then, we received further data and are really overwhelmed by everyone’s support and want to say a big THANK YOU!

One team member took BigWhoop to Observatorio del Teide

  As a team, we believe in BigWhoop and we will keep on working on it. One team member took a sensor device with him on a measurements campaign of his work and monitored the spectrum on his free time next to the Teide volcano on Tenerife. The scientific paper about the project was selected for the International Astronautical Congress 2015 in Jerusalem and we will present the Space Apps Challenge with “Opportunities of an open-source global sensor network monitoring the radio spectrum for the (new) space community” during the SPACE COMMUNICATIONS AND NAVIGATION SYMPOSIUM. And lastly, BigWhoop will serve as the ground station application for the Distributed Ground Station Network project also related to shackspace. There, it will help us tracking and communicating with small satellites globally and continuously and thus helping the satellite operators to get their positions and payload data faster than other systems.

Concludingly, BigWhoop and the NASA Space Apps Challenge was fun and a great experience. We learned so much during the event, we felt to be part of a global community, work(ed) on solving an important problem and started a project that can become even more than we can currently imagine. We as the local organizer and team will definitely apply for Space Apps Challenge 2016 again and bring it back to Stuttgart for you to tackle new challenges. We hope, that you like our BigWhoop project as much we do and give us your vote during the People’s Choice awards and make it win the space challenge!

  Links:

bigwhoop.aerospaceresearch.net

vote for #BigWHoop

code on GitHub.com/aerospaceresearch/dgsn_bigwhoop

follow twitter.com/dgsn_bigwhoop

  [Remaining Photos]

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This is the "Only 6 days left to NASA Space Apps Challenge Stuttgart 2015" reminder.

NASA Space Apps Challenge in a nutshell * biggest global hackathon * 2 days (11./12. April 2015) * 4 space challenges, many open source projects (Outer Space, Earth, Robotics, Humans) * > 90 cities around the world, > 6000 participants * solve global problems, win awards and prizes * form your team, your talent, your start-up (software, hardware, media, everything)

Register today for Space Apps Stuttgart 2015 > https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/location/stuttgart/ (it is free!) > 11.-12. April, opening 13:00 o'clock, late start possible > shackspace, Stuttgart Hackerspace, Ulmer Str. 255 (U4/U9 "Im Degen") > one project was already started in an early kick-off (BigWhoop[4]), now it is yours to be started! :)

Take your chance to solve global problems. We are looking forward to meet you. Hack space!

Your Space Apps Stuttgart team

#### Full News #### We, AerospaceResearch.net (a DGLR student team at the University of Stuttgart) are proud in bringing back the NASA Space Applications Challenge (Space Apps) to Stuttgart[0]. This year the goal is have a bigger, better event as well as a small head-start to give us a better chance at winning one of the awards. And we are inviting you to become a part of it!

The Space Apps Hackaton event will be held during 11.-12. April, we will open the doors at 13:00 o'clock on Saturday and you can always come and join during the full weekend. For early birds, we will already open the location Friday, 10. April at 20:00 o'clock for a warm-up and mingling phase in our location at Stuttgart hackerspace shackspace.

There will be several challenges and projects provided by NASA for you to work on. Just visit https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/ and select one. The AerospaceResearch.net team is working on the Distributed Ground Station Network[1] for tracking small satellites and its proof-of-concept project BigWhoop, a global sensor grid for radio spectrum monitoring with software defined radio. You can either join the team or work on any of the other projects.

We already hosted Space Apps in Stuttgart's creative hackerspace shackspace in 2012 and it was a great event for working on space projects within an interdisciplinary team as well as for networking and founding a start-up. So feel invited to be part of this great space event and the global space community!

For more information feel free to contact us. There will be food ordering and a free box of Club Mate Cola! And we will also have free "DVB-T sticks" as give-aways, because these will be our sensors!. You can even join the team from abroad, or you just attend one of the many other Space Apps locations[0]!

Just come and hack space!

Your Space Apps Stuttgart team

About Space Apps: Space Apps is an international mass collaboration/hackathon focused on space exploration that takes place over a 48-hours timespan in cities all around the world. The event embraces collaborative problem solving with a goal of producing relevant open-source solutions to address global needs applicable to both life on Earth and life in space. NASA supplies different challenges which you can tackle.[2]

### About the Event: ### Free entrance! Everyone’s welcome! Date: Saturday and Sunday, 11.-12. April, opening 13:00 o'clock Driving direction: U4/U9 Stop “Im Degen”, Ulmer Straße 255, Stuttgart Wangen (next to Kulturhaus Arena) Kindly supported by DGLR Stuttgart

[0] https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/location/stuttgart/ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC4Ls3AGHf4 [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/AppsChallenge [3] like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SpaceAppsStuttgart [4] https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/project/bigwhoop-global-spectrum-monitoring/

[aerospaceresearch-blog]

This is why we ask #RosettaAreWeThereYet; new input! Good Speed, @ESA_Rosetta. @IRS_RZBW @Uni_Stuttgart @esa. We did this video to explain what our CometTrails app does, how our users helped us in here and because the Rosetta probe reached its desitnation August 6.

If you want to get the CometTrails code @smmrmx @JulianHzg did during @gsoc check @github -> http://fb.me/1tIn9i1vn

And if you like the music played in our @ESA_Rosetta video http://youtu.be/FY0vjbBp4eg , it is Hope For Rebirth by @celestialaeon found on @Jamendo

[aerospaceresearch-blog]

Rosetta approaching Kevin! Our GSOC students code the Comet Trails application, which simulates the durst streams generated by comets. And as XKCD fans, we slected 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko aka Kevin as our first target. So what will happen to ESA’s Rosetta mission when passing the simulated dust stream? Let’s find out! :)

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After 4 hours of crawling through the source code, Marta and me (Andreas) found the logical bug in the positioning source code. It was a hard task, but finally we found it. This good feeling is reward enough and why Google Summer of Code is so much fun! :) The bug was, that the s variable was fixed, but we needed it flexible. It was a leftover from the first tests with fixed data-sets. It is now working correctly and we can go on. We will keep you updated!

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Work progress so far:

- added an option to the ParticleIntegrator app: “save_as_binary” If set, the app now produces one big binary file that contains all of a work unit’s particles instead of heaving one text file for each particle in the WU. All in all this, reduced data size by a factor of 6…

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ESA Summer of Code in Space (SOCIS) started and me and Talia play around with our RTL-SDR Dongles and receive ADSB signals from airplanes (the yellow horizontal dashes). This is for getting used with the hard and software, so that we can use them for our radio frequency receiver grid …

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AerospaceResearch.net is proud to announce to be selected for the Summer of Code in Space 2014 (SOCIS) program run by the European Space Agency (ESA). SOCIS "aims at offering student developers stipends to write code for various space-related open source software projects. Through SOCIS, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from the participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios. In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers."[0] As an official SOCIS mentoring organization, AerospaceResearch.net[0] accepts applications for mentors and students for ESA SOCIS 2014, now! As a mentor, you can realize your space software, and as a student you are coding it during the summer and are paid €4000 by the European Space Agency for it!

For you students, the application period starts now and will end 15/05/2014. Prepare yourself and read our and all the other 20 organizations' ideas. And then come back to AerospaceResearch.net, because we have the most awesome coding ideas for your. They are all space applications! Here is a brief overview:

[click the link to get forwarded to the full news!]

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@Google just published the accepted proposals for Summer of Code @gsoc. Congratulations to our 4 students! #codeon

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Hello everyone, in exactly one week the "Space Race - Yuri's Night 2014: Hunting Comets!" team challenge on BoincStats will start. The challenge will support our Comet Trails simulation by the Dust Team of the Insitute of Space Systems (IRS) at University of Stuttgart. Comet Trails is their project for the Interplanetary Meteoroid Environment for eXploration (IMEX) initiative by the European Space Agency (ESA). There are already 14 teams in for for the Yuri's Night challenge and we hope to see more of you participating there. So go to BoincStats, register your team and then join the fun April 11th at 12:00 UTC. This is our annual team challenge to honor Yuri Gagarin, first human in space, and our own birthday. Be there, have fun, celebrate!

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Cometary Trails calculation worth 5 years done in 5 days! thx citizen scientists.

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Your Team ready for a challenge? Space Race Yuri's Night 2014: Hunting Comets! Crunch4space 12.April!

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Some more @GSOC statistics: 33 students, 1.7878787878 proposals per student, mostly proposals for our ideas. But also new ideas and 2 of them made us smile! :)

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The students application period for Google Summer of Code 2014 is closed now and we received 36 proposals. During our very first GSOC participation last year, we received 32 proposals.

The linked graph shows the received proposals against the time. On March 14th we had our collective IRC meeting, where we answered your questions and also advised you to take time for your proposals. We are glad that you did that and we received a high number of proposals fully meeting our requirements. This is also due to you asking questions about our ideas and feeding back these information into your proposals. This year, we only had two proposals by students, who did not even read what we are working on as an organization. The very last proposal dropped in 63 seconds, and the last modification was saved 27 seconds before the deadline at 19:00 UTC.

So, we will start our evaluation process this weekend. Please check your emails regularly. In case we have further questions we will contact you. The selected students will be informed 21. April. Until then, keep in touch with us, ask questions, use 40000 PCs for your already ready aerospace application! ;)

[aerospaceresearch-blog]

Le projet Constellation a lancé officielle sa nouvelle application Comet trails, mercredi dernier. « Après des essais concluants réalisés ces derniers mois, il est possible de rejoindre le projet I...

Trés bizarre óu je trouve nos message de projet Constellation :D ...

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Comet Trails: An IMEX application for predicting meteor storms at spacecraft or planets AerospaceResearch.net is happy to announce the next application running on the Constellation platform, the "IMEX Cometary trails". After successful tests during the last months, you will now help predicting meteor storms at spacecraft or planets by donating idle computing time. Description: The "IMEX Comet trails" project is an ESA-funded project run at the Institute of Space Systems (IRS) at the University of Stuttgart to characterize dust trails produced by comets in the inner solar system. We want to predict meteor showers at any position or time in the solar system: for example, can we predict meteor storms at spacecraft or at other planets?; can we understand how dust produced by comets disperses to form the interplanetary dust cloud? Read full news here

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AerospaceResearch.net accepts applications for mentors and students for Google Summer of Code (GSOC) 2014, now! As a mentor, you can realize your space software, and as a student you are coding it during the summer and are paid US$5500 by Google for it! The application period for Mentors is open now and you can apply via https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org2/google/gsoc2014/aerospaceresearchnet. So be creative and propose your idea and be a trustworthy mentor to a young and creative mind! For you students, the application period starts 10 March and will end 21 March. Prepare yourself and read our and all the other 190 organizations' ideas. And then come back to AerospaceResearch.net, because we have the most awesome coding ideas for your. They are all space applications! Here is a brief overview:

[SSGT-XX] Solar System Grand Tour (continuation of last year's GSOC project)

[DGSN-XX] Distributed Ground Station Network

[COMT-XX] Comet Trails (supported by Institute of Space Systems, Stuttgart University)

[SNET-XX] Sensor Networks (supported by RadioPunks)

[DEOP-XX] Dynamical Evolution of Protoplanets