Registration for the NASA Asteroid Data Hunter contest starts on Saint Patrick’s Day. It’s part of a series of Asteroid Data challenges that NASA’s Tournament Lab is organizing to spur crowdsourced software tools. The idea is to turn space enthusiasts with software experience onto the challenges of detecting near-earth objects (NEOs).
Asteroid Data Hunter is focused on finding improved algorithms to help sort possible asteroids from data generated by ground-based telescopes. Winning solutions (there is around $35,000 in prize money) must work on all computing platforms, decrease the rate of false positives, and otherwise improve the sensitivity of detection.
The contest utilizes the Topcoder platform, so interested participants will need to register on the site as well as for the contest.
Pasco Phronesis 