Why this exists

NASA publishes an enormous amount of open data. During a 48-hour hackathon, finding the right piece of it can eat the first half of the weekend.

Space Apps teams start from a problem: track surface change with radar, merge two fire records, map a route on Mars. The data lives across dozens of archives with different logins, formats and search tools. Space Data Atlas starts from the problem instead and works back to the data, so a team can spend its time building.

How it is made

Each challenge summary is paraphrased from the official page and links back to it. Each dataset was checked against NASA's live services on the date shown, and each starter snippet that needs no login was run before it was published. The suggestions are my own reading of the challenges, not the official resource lists, which arrive October 28.

Who made it

I'm Swapnil Tamse, an engineering leader in AI and AI security in New York. I also built Wiring the Moon, an explainer of NASA's lunar communications plans. This one is a free resource for Space Apps teams. Independent project. Not affiliated with, produced by, or endorsed by NASA or NASA Space Apps.

Corrections

Found a wrong link or a better dataset for a challenge? Open an issue on GitHub. The code and data are MIT licensed, so fork it for your own event.