Artash is a high school student. He loves building rockets, battle bots, and applying machine learning to solve big challenges including creating self-learning multimodal robots and algorithms to detect biosignatures of life. In 2020 his project on Using Machine Learning to Remove Stellar Noise from Exoplanetary Data won the Gold Medal at 2020 IRIC North American Continental STEM Fair, and all the 3 ribbons at 2020 Youth Science Canada Online STEM Fair. He has participated in 40+ hackathons and has been participating in NASA SpaceApps since 2014.
 
Arushi is a middle school student. She loves building robots, rovers, and working on projects that mix space, arts, and music. She participated in her first hackathon when she was 5 years. Since then she has participated in 35+ hackathons. In 2017, her project "Yes I Can" won the Canadian Space Apps Challenge 2017 and was invited to present her project at the Canadian Space Agency and to meet the new astronauts. In 2020 she completed “Explore the Universe” program of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada and received her observing certificate and pin.
 
Artash and Arushi are the Global Winners of 2020 NASA SpaceApps COVID19 Challenge and have been invited by NASA to witness a spacecraft launch when travel is deemed safe. They both believe the best way to learn new things is to make projects and teach others. In 2014, they co-founded www.HotPopRobot.com to bring conversations and projects on science and space exploration to the next generation. 

Last modified: Wednesday, 19 August 2026, 10:16 PM