NASA launches contest: Identify asteroids, win $35k

Washington, March 11: Here is a very novel contest - Help

identify

and win $35,000 ! The contest is organised by the space agency NASA and is called 'Asteroid Data Hunter contest series'.

The space agency wants citizens to develop improved algorithms that can be used to identify asteroids, over the next six months.

The contest series is being conducted in partnership with Planetary Resources Inc. of Bellevue, Wash, said an ANI report.

The first contest in the series will be on March 17. Prior to that, competitors can create an account on the contest series website and learn more about the rules and different phases of the contest series.

The contest is handled by NASA Tournament Lab and will run through August.

"For the past three years, NASA has been learning and advancing the ability to leverage distributed algorithm and coding skills through the NASA Tournament Lab to solve tough problems," Jason Crusan, NASA Tournament Lab director, said.

"We are now applying our experience with algorithm contests to helping protect the planet from asteroid threats through image analysis," he said.

Details of the contest

The Asteroid Data Hunter contest series wants participants to develop significantly improved algorithms to identify asteroids in images captured by ground-based telescopes. The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computer systems.

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