openNASA

I can confess that I have spent many an hour playing with Google Earth.

I’ll descend into street view and roam around places I’ve never been, or, more often than not, prowl the streets of my hometown. While fun, sometimes I can’t help but think that there ought to be some way for this incredible technology to have practical applications for the non-professional admirer, such as myself.

Luckily, a Space Apps team in Sweden had the same idea, and armed with the multitudes of global climate data NASA has provided the world for free, they set about making this idea a reality.

The NASA Greener Cities Project has three main goals. One, as previously mentioned, is to make use of the volumes of data NASA has provided on global climate data. Except Greener Cities goes a step further, incorporating a platform that allows users to add to preexisting data sets from their own experiences working with the land they monitor and farm. This first goal works cooperatively with the second, which is to support local agriculture in the general population. By making information regarding soil condition and air quality more accessible, Greener Cities encourages people to utilize the land around them for farming, even in urban areas. Lastly, the NASA Greener Cities Project hopes to spark an interest in the environment and programming in young minds, by giving them a platform to explore such concepts through revolutionizing the Greener Cities prototype.

The entire app was brainstormed and put together during the 2013 Space Apps Challenge in Gothenburg, Sweden.