“Spaced Out” Zicklin Students Win Prize at World’s Largest Hackathon

Clockwise from upper left: Erick, Mateusz, Brayan, Nicole, Kacper

A team of six Baruch students, five from the Zicklin School, joined the world’s largest hackathon recently—and won a prize. 

The undergrad wonders, mostly students in Vinayak Javaly’s Computer Information Systems 3120 class, competed as Team Mission CTRL in the NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2025. NASA’s theme this year, “Meteor Madness,” posed the question, “What if an asteroid struck Earth tomorrow?”

Under a tight, 48-hour deadline, Zicklin undergraduates Erick Buitrago Maldonado, Mateusz Drozdz, Brayan Guaman-Camas, Nicole Liu, and Kacper Zmiejko (all BBA, ’26), along with Weissman student Reina Huang, developed CosmoSim, an interactive, data-driven simulation platform that modeled the effects on the Earth of an asteroid strike.  

Students gathered real-world Near-Earth Object (NEO) data from NASA and earthquake data from the US Geological Survey to build a website, employing GitHub, OpenSpace, Cloudflare AI, JavaScript, and other technical tools. CosmoSim is intended to speed up decision-making in emergency response planning by estimating impact location, energy release, affected radius, and other factors.  

“I am exceptionally proud of these students,” said Zicklin instructor Javaly. “They deserve full recognition for their proactive approach in joining the multi-university hackathon and for their impressive work ethic in designing and implementing a solution in a very short time. They set an inspiring example for their peers.” 

“Turning data into an interactive web app reminded me how good it feels to create something you’re truly proud of,” said Erick, who was responsible for building the CosmoSim prototype and deploying it to the cloud.  

And if that wasn’t impactful—nay, cosmic—enough, CosmoSim landed Mission CTRL the Global Impact Award. 

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