A NASA awarded team of student scientists, dubbed the #BruteForce group, received a warm welcome from House Speaker Annita Demetriou on Tuesday.
The team of young scientists were amongst the top ten winners of the international #NASA Space Apps Challenge 2022, awarded for their work in mapping seismic activity on the moon using specially designed instruments.
They created a model of the moon, on which they mapped PSE stations with their data as plots when interacted with, as well as shallow moonquakes as ripples according to their magnitude.
In an Instagram post, Demetriou extended her congratulations to Panagiotis Theodorou, Konstantinos Aristodemou and George Evangelou.
She commended them, stating that “with their invaluable combination of technical expertise, visionary innovation, and hard work, our young talents presented an idea that garnered global recognition among hundreds of candidates worldwide.”
“We received Panagiotis Theodorou, Konstantinos Aristodemou and George Evangelou from the #BruteForce team, one of the ten winning teams in the international #NASA Space Apps Challenge 2022,” she posted.
Role model
She added that heartfelt congratulations are well-deserved for all team members, serving as a role model and emphasising teamwork, collective action and the spirit of collaboration.
“Initiatives like these fill us with pride for our youth, showcasing excellence and instilling optimism for the future. It is our duty to support every effort of youth presence in the public sphere that brings honour to Cyprus and its people,” said Demetriou.
Ten teams from around the world were selected as the winners of the 2022 NASA International Space Apps Challenge. Dubbed the “largest annual global hackathon in the world,” the goal of the Space Apps Challenge is for teams to create open-source solutions to address challenges on Earth and in space around a specific theme.
The Nicosia based team was presented by NASA with the Local Impact award for developing an app that plots the seismic data these instruments transmitted back to Earth on an interactive 3-D globe.
“By paying attention to the internal pulses of our closest celestial body (the moon) we aimed to understand its internal structure. We analysed data provided by Apollo PSE seismometers and plotted seismic events,” said the team in their project description.
