Tripoli in the Space

Since the 1960s, NASA has sent many machines and scientific instruments into space. Some of them are still working, while others have completed their missions or stopped working.

These include:

• Rovers (vehicles that move across the surface of another planet or moon)
• Landers (spacecraft designed to land on the surface of a planet or moon)
• Probes (spacecraft sent to explore space or collect scientific information)
• Scientific instruments (tools used to measure things such as temperature, radiation, gases, or the atmosphere)

NASA has left some of this hardware on the Moon and Mars, while other spacecraft have traveled far into deep space (the regions of space far beyond Earth and the planets).

Your challenge is to tell the story of some or all of this NASA hardware and make it interesting and understandable for school-age students who are interested in space.

Earth’s environmental system (Atmosphere, Oceans and Water, Land, Plants, Animals, Climate, Weather, etc.) is always changing. When a change continues in the same direction—such as rising, falling, increasing, decreasing, thickening, or thinning—measured variables show this change.

However, a variable can change in one direction in one region and in the opposite direction in another region, even when the same process causes both changes.

Your challenge is to find and examine variables measured by NASA missions or produced by NASA models, visualize how they change over time, and determine:

• What is changing
• Where it is changing
• How much it is changing
• Whether the changes are “significant”

Space-themed STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) content often makes space missions either too simple or too complicated for young learners.

Your challenge is to create an interactive game or app where students manage an outpost on the Moon or Mars.

They must balance different needs, such as:

• Life support (systems that help people stay alive)
• Radiation shielding (protection from harmful radiation)
• Power (energy needed to operate the outpost)
• Food production (growing or producing food)

The goal is for students to experience how different decisions can affect whether a mission fails or succeeds.

Missions to the Moon’s south pole have difficult lighting and communication conditions. Teams need to carefully plan where and when to land.

Tools already exist to check the positions of the Sun and Earth at possible landing sites, but they can be difficult to use.

The challenge is to create an easy-to-use tool or application that allows mission planners, educators, and the public to quickly compare landing sites and dates. The tool should show the positions of the Sun and Earth relative to the horizon, helping users understand:

• Power generation potential (how much sunlight is available for generating power)
• Direct-to-Earth communication windows (when the landing site can communicate directly with Earth)

Long-duration space missions can expose astronauts to space radiation, isolation and confinement, altered gravity, and a closed and hostile environment. These conditions can cause changes in the immune system, bones, cardiovascular system, and behavioral health.

During long missions, astronauts are responsible for noticing many of these changes themselves.

The challenge is to build health monitoring software that:

• Collects astronauts’ health indicators (information that shows their health status).
• Allows astronauts to evaluate their health status.
• Helps them take action based on their health status.

Earth’s surface is constantly changing because of natural processes and human activities. These changes can include wetland loss, forest wildfires, earthquakes, farming activities, and glacier movement.

The challenge is to build an interactive application that uses radar remote sensing data from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission to track and visualize one or more types of surface change in locations around the world.

SAR stands for Synthetic Aperture Radar. It is a type of radar used for remote sensing, meaning it can collect information about Earth’s surface from a distance.

Farmers around the world face changing temperatures, rainfall patterns, water shortages, extreme weather, and declining soil health. These challenges make it harder to decide which crops to grow in rotation (changing the crops grown in a field over time).

The challenge is to create a decision-support tool that uses:

• NASA Earth observations (information collected by NASA about Earth)
• Local soil information
• Crop characteristics
• Farmers’ priorities

The tool should help farmers explore different crop rotation strategies that could improve soil health, conserve water, and help farms adapt to changing conditions.

For many years, NASA has studied how flames and fire behave in microgravity (very low gravity, like the environment in space). NASA has collected a large amount of experimental data from these studies.

This information is becoming increasingly important as humans prepare to return to the Moon and travel to Mars, but the large amount of data makes it difficult to find, compare, and understand the results.

The challenge is to create an interactive, AI-powered dashboard that:

• Summarizes the research findings.
• Ranks the findings.
• Interprets the findings (explains their meaning).
• Provides fire safety insights for human space exploration.

Satellites have been tracking active fire hotspots (locations where fires are currently detected) for more than 20 years. This includes wildfires and agricultural burns that are intense enough to be detected by satellite sensors.

However, the data comes from different sensors, and their records cannot be directly compared. This makes it difficult for fire managers to have a consistent picture of when and where fires have occurred.

The challenge is to build a web application that combines and harmonizes these records into a burning activity calendar. The application should allow early warning and emergency responders, scientists, and land managers to examine:

• Historical fire patterns
• Unusual fire conditions
• Critical periods
• Burning activity in a selected area of interest (the geographic area being studied)

Choosing future landing sites and lunar base locations depends on factors such as topography (land shape and elevation), geology (rocks and geological features), environment, and available resources.

Some places on Earth have characteristics similar to the Moon or Mars, such as the Atacama Desert, Haughton Crater, and Death Valley. These places are called terrestrial analog sites (Earth locations that can be used to study or test conditions similar to those on another planet). However, many of these Earth analog sites are not well characterized.

The challenge is to use open data from NASA and other space agencies about Earth, the Moon, and Mars to identify and characterize new terrestrial analog sites for future bases or landing sites.

The sites could include deserts, polar regions, volcanic and arid terrains, caves, and other environments that share conditions with the lunar or Martian surface.

NASA has explored Mars with robotic missions for many years. These missions have studied Mars’s extreme environment, mapped its surface, and collected different types of data.

When the first astronauts travel to Mars, they will need detailed maps to help them:

• Plan their routes and destinations.
• See current conditions.
• Access the information needed to complete their mission quickly and safely.
• Conduct new scientific investigations during their journey.

The challenge is to create a layered, integrated view of a location or route on Mars. It should combine data from multiple NASA science missions to help a human explorer plan and carry out a successful Marswalk while doing science along the way.

Since 2025, NASA’s SPHEREx mission has been mapping the entire sky every six months using 102 bands of near-infrared light. It has produced images of more than one billion objects.

Objects such as comets, asteroids, stars, brown dwarfs, and even new planets can be identified when they change position between images.

However, the amount of data is too large for one person to examine alone.

The challenge is to create a public-facing web tool that displays images of the sky from the SPHEREx mission and makes it easy for anyone to quickly see how the sky changes over time.

Designing a space mission requires making decisions about many things, such as the mission goals, spacecraft, scientific instruments, launch vehicle, budget, power, mass, communications, and orbit.

The challenge is to create an interactive game where participants can:

• Design a complete space mission.
• Make engineering decisions.
• Manage limited resources.
• Simulate and manage the mission from its concept to its operation.
• See how their decisions affect the success of the mission.

NASA’s Earth Information Center (EIC) creates visualizations that show how Earth is changing. However, using only visualizations can limit who can experience and understand this Earth science.

The challenge is to create an “Earth Jukebox”— an interface, script, or application that:

• Uses visual frames from the Earth Information Center (EIC).
• Converts the information shown in these visuals into sound.
• Generates the sounds dynamically in real time.
• Makes Earth science more accessible, engaging, and multi-sensory.