US Embassy congratulates Cypriot team Brute Force for being one of global winners of NASA competition

The US Embassy in Nicosia has congratulated the Cypriot team Brute Force for being one of the global winners of the 2022 NASA Space Apps Challenge international competition.

“Huge congratulations to Team Brute Force from Cyprus for being named one of 10 global winners in the 2022 NASA Space Apps Challenge which included over 5,300 teams from 162 countries” the Embassy says in a post on its facebook account.

It adds that the group’s innovative Moonquake Map for Planetary Scientists uses publicly available data from instruments installed on the Moon during the Apollo program.

“We applaud Team Brute Force for being among the best in this global competition”, it concludes.

The team “Brute Force”, comprising Constantinos Aristodemou, Marios Iacovou, Giorgos Evangelou and Panagiotis Theodorou, made a project on Moonquake Map and won the first prize for their project. NASA said that their solution “demonstrates the greatest potential for local impact”.

The team represented Cyprus in the international scale of the NASA competition, after winning first prize in the local scale of the competition that was organised by the Cyprus Space Exploration Organisation (CSEO) in Cyprus.

CSEO President George Danos told CNA that “the Organisation is thrilled that once again young people from Cyprus make us proud” and recalled previous successes when Cypriot teams also won first prizes at the competition.

“We got the first prize again and let me remind you how many times we have won a NASA prize in the past. Our team has done a project that maps quakes on the surface of the moon,” he said.

Danos congratulated the team on their success and said they will soon have news about their trip to Cape Canaveral in Florida to watch a rocket launch.

The NASA International Space Apps Challenge (Space Apps) is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space.

Each October, over the course of two days, Space Apps brings participants from around the world together at hundreds of in-person and virtual local events to solve challenges submitted by NASA experts. After the hackathon, project submissions are judged by space agency experts and winners are selected for one of 10 Global Awards.

Space Apps provides problem-solvers worldwide with NASA’s free and open data, giving teams the opportunity to learn how to use these resources to solve each year’s challenges.

Since its inception in 2012, NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge has engaged 220,000+ registrants from 185+ countries/territories in using NASA’s open data to build innovative solutions to challenges we face on Earth and in space. CNA was the media sponsor of the competition in Cyprus.

Source: Cyprus News Agency