Today (April 10) marks the start of the International Space Apps Challenge, a global hackathon open to anyone with an Internet connection that aims to use data from NASA and other space organizations to solve real-world problems.

Participants in the International Space Apps Challenge are tasked with creating mobile applications, software, hardware, data visualization tools and platforms that either take on one of the "challenges" created by NASA or tackle unique projects.

Attendees of the New York City local event, hosted at Microsoft NYC in Times Square, will have the opportunity to hear from and work with astronauts Cady Coleman, Richard Garriott, Ron Garan and Gregory Johnson, as well as other NASA officials. [10 Best Space Apps in the Universe]

In anticipation of this weekend's event, Space.com talked with one of the Space Apps Challenge creators: technologist and developer Sean Herron. We asked Herron about where the idea for the challenge came from, what the weekend-long event is like in different parts of the world and how people of many different skill levels can participate.

Space.com: How did you and your colleagues at NASA came up with the idea for the International Space Apps Challenge?

Sean Herron: We were thinking about how there's this huge mass of people all around the world who are just incredible fans of NASA and space in general. And [we saw] all these amazing things that come out on the Internet all the time, of people doing just great stuff with data collected from NASA missions.

And our thought was, would there be a really cool way to kind of tap all of this genius and bring them together, and have one big event to try andsolve what we call "problems of a global nature?"

So, what if we got the best and brightest inside of NASA to say, "These are challenges that NASA has in various areas from climate change, to ways of doing human space flight on long-duration missions, to all these different areas." What if we drafted some very small challenges, very small pieces of those larger problems, and put them to that collective consciousness for a weekend and just see what they came up with?

And so that was the initial impetus behind the idea. And we hosted the first event back in 2012, where we ended up bringing together I think 70 countries around the world, with thousands of people coming together, working on a whole bunch of challenges that had been inspired by NASA missions. And it was really amazing to see what came out of that.

Space.com: The challenge is something people can do from home, or they can go to event centers in over 130 cities all over the world. Which events have you been able to attend, and what are they like?

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Cosmic Hackathon: Q&A with Space Apps Challenge Co-Founder Sean Herron