As in the past, the JKU continued to serve as a contest venue, focusing on this year’s topic: Space Mining. Participants received a 10-year dataset about near-earth asteroids and were asked to not only classify the asteroids for space mining, but also classify any potential danger to Earth.

In addition to a competition for school students featuring over 1,000 participants, the highlight was the main competition. The winning team in Austria was a young group of students from Vienna. In the international arena, last year’s winners from Pretoria (South Africa) managed to push ahead of the competition once again and claim victory by completing the sixth level of the task in 2 hours, 58 minutes, and 16 seconds. The participants faced enormous challenges as the satellites sending the information looked toward the Earth from the direction of Venus. The asteroids had different speeds and rotated on 3 axes. Identifying one asteroid among tens of thousands of images and from the brightness properties such as, for example, calculating volume, was part of the challenge.