NASA Space Apps Colombo 2020: SEDS Sri Lanka's First Local Hackathon

October 3–4, 2020 marked a milestone for Sri Lanka's space community: the country's first-ever local edition of the NASA Space Apps Challenge, organized by SEDS Sri Lanka (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space).

Event Overview

NASA Space Apps Colombo 2020 was held entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. SEDS Sri Lanka ran the event in direct collaboration with NASA, partnering with 16 universities across both the private and government higher-education sectors. Around 600 participants took part, forming teams to tackle NASA's global challenge briefs using open space-agency data.

Standout Teams and Results

Two Sri Lankan teams stood out on the global stage:

• Team Space Designers — Competed in the "Let's Connect" challenge by redesigning the International Space Station docking system. Their proposal replaced the traditional soft-capture ring with three moving arms acting as a guidance mechanism for docking spacecraft. The team advanced as a global nominee finalist and received a Global Honorable Mention — a rare achievement for a first-time national participant.
• Team Space Hunters — Also advanced as a global nominee finalist, representing Sri Lanka at the international judging round.

At the university level, Wayamba University of Sri Lanka fielded three teams — Team Pandora, Mars Attackers, and dthd — drawn from its Faculty of Technology and Faculty of Applied Sciences. With 60 Sri Lankan teams competing for the national spotlight, Team Pandora finished 5th locally, decided through a public Facebook vote that ran over nine days.

Why the 2020 Edition Mattered

This debut event put Sri Lanka on the map within the global NASA Space Apps community for the first time, opening a pathway for local students in coding, engineering, design, and data science to work directly with NASA's open datasets. It also set the template SEDS Sri Lanka would repeat and grow in the years that followed.

Quick Facts: NASA Space Apps Colombo 2020