The planet below is live.
Real satellite imagery, tonight's day-and-night line, the International Space Station right now, and every wildfire NASA detected yesterday. This is the data you will build with. It all begins on Friday, November 13 at 16:00 with the kick-off, orientation and networking with our sponsors, before the 48-hour hackathon on November 14-15.
Register for the eventStart with Earth.
Six of this year's fourteen challenges are about our own planet: fire hot spots, surface change from radar, farming under shifting climate, long-term trends, and turning it all into something people want to explore.
The two rarely line up: one sees heat, the other counts incidents. Fire records that come from different sensors and sources and cannot be compared directly are the gap NASA wants closed in the Harmonization of MODIS and VIIRS Hot Spots challenge.
Plan the return.
Commercial landers are heading for the lunar south pole, where light and communications are brutal. Browse the missions, find the places on Earth that look like a Moon base, and tell the story of the hardware already left behind.
Survive the red planet.
Decades of rovers and landers have mapped Mars. Turn that into a survival guide, or design the whole mission yourself.
Your move, Lucerne.
From a billion infrared objects mapped by SPHEREx to the health of astronauts and the behavior of fire in freefall: join us for the kick-off on Friday, November 13 at 16:00 for orientation and networking with our sponsors, then pick a challenge, form a team, and ship something over the weekend of November 14-15, 2026.
Mission Team
Volunteers and advisors from SSIP and the Lucerne space community, organizing the NASA Space Apps Challenge in Lucerne.
Mission Sponsors
Our sponsors and partners make the event free for every participant. Meet them at the kick-off on Friday, November 13 at 16:00.
Live Data
Most of what moves on this page is real. These public feeds are the same kind of data you can build with during the hackathon.
| Where you see it | Source | What the feed offers |
|---|---|---|
| Daylight Earth (hero, Focus 1) | NASA GIBS · Blue Marble shaded relief with bathymetry | Satellite imagery served as map images. GIBS offers hundreds more layers, from clouds and sea-surface temperature to vegetation and aerosols, many updated daily. |
| City lights on the night side | NASA GIBS · VIIRS Black Marble | Night-time lights seen from orbit, a stand-in for where people live and how much energy they use. |
| Day and night line | Calculated in your browser from the current UTC time | The Sun’s position over the planet right now. No outside feed. |
| Red patches (hero, Focus 1) | NASA GIBS · VIIRS Suomi NPP 375 m thermal anomalies, yesterday | Daily global heat detections from a satellite sensor: wildfires, agricultural burns and industrial flares. The underlying points on NASA FIRMS add brightness, confidence, fire radiative power and acquisition time. |
| Orange dots | NASA EONET v3 · open wildfire events, currently reported by the US interagency system IRWIN | Named events with location, date history, size in acres and a link to the source. EONET also tracks volcanoes, floods, sea and lake ice, dust and haze, drought and more. |
| Blue dots and rings (hurricanes) | NASA EONET v3 · severe storms, from tropical cyclone advisories (JTWC / US Navy, NOAA NHC) | Storm name, position track with dates and maximum wind in knots. This page hides storms whose last position is older than three days. |
| ISS marker and trail | Where the ISS at? public API | Latitude, longitude, altitude (about 420 km), speed (about 27,600 km/h), whether the station is in daylight or Earth’s shadow, and the area it can see. Refreshed every 6 seconds here. |
| Aurora ovals and Kp readout | NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center · planetary K-index | Geomagnetic activity on a scale of 0 to 9 in three-hour steps. The higher the Kp, the further toward the equator the aurora is seen. |
| Solar-wind particles and speed | NOAA SWPC · real-time solar wind, 1-minute | Speed, density and temperature of the solar wind, measured by spacecraft about 1.5 million km sunward of Earth, with data-quality flags. |
| Challenge panels | NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026 | Official title, difficulty, subjects and summary of each challenge, with a link to the full statement. Not a live feed. |
| The Moon and Mars | Illustration | Stylised surfaces with real landing-site positions. Not to scale and not live data. |
| The Milky Way finale | Illustration | Generated in your browser and inspired by an ESA/Hubble image of a spiral galaxy. The Sun marker is approximate. |