NASA Space Apps Challenge —
ISS Tracker

The challenge

The NASA Space Apps Challenge is NASA's annual global hackathon — one of the largest in the world — where teams of students, engineers, and innovators tackle real-world space and Earth challenges using NASA open data.

Mario Blazevski and the AerTh team competed with the "Track the ISS Station" challenge — building a real-time application to monitor and visualise the orbital position of the International Space Station using live NASA telemetry feeds.

What was built

• A real-time ISS tracking application leveraging NASA's public orbital telemetry data and APIs
• Orbital mechanics modelling to predict and display the ISS ground track and overpass times
• Programmatic data pipeline integrating live position data, velocity vectors, and orbital parameters
• Visualisation interface displaying current ISS position, altitude, and trajectory on a live map

Kennedy Space Center

As part of the Space Apps Challenge experience, the team visited Kennedy Space Center, NASA's primary launch facility on Merritt Island, Florida — one of the most iconic sites in the history of human spaceflight. The visit deepened the technical context behind the ISS tracking project and provided direct exposure to active launch infrastructure.

Technical context

This project was an early demonstration of the computational and systems engineering skills that now define Mario's work — combining orbital mechanics theory, real-time data integration, and embedded programming in a single end-to-end system. The same approach underpins later UAV telemetry and autonomous navigation projects.