BARUCH COLLEGE–A team of Baruch College students won the Galactic Impact Award at the 2025 NASA International Space Apps Challenge in New York City, a global hackathon competition where teams have 48 hours to build a project using NASA data. Their project, CosmoSim, is a platform that shows what might happen if an asteroid hits the Earth. The idea came from a recent comet, known as ATLAS, that passed the Earth.
“It made them wonder what the real impact of a strike would look like. We just thought: what if we take the closest asteroids around Earth and make a simulation? If one of those asteroids came and hit us, what would happen?” team leader Nicole Liu said in an interview with The Ticker.
CosmoSim lets users click on any location on a map and see the possible impacts, which includes tsunamis, earthquakes, shockwaves and damage ranges. The team came from different majors.
“This is my first time becoming a team leader, and I think I’ve done basically everything wrong,” Liu said.
