Launching on March 17, the NASA Tournament Lab at IQSS will challenge interested competitors to find better methods of detecting asteroids.
The NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) is a collaboration among NASA, Harvard Business School, and TopCoder, and housed at IQSS. The Lab uses crowdsourcing to enable a community of more than 600,000 designers, developers and data scientists to create the most innovative, most efficient, and most optimized solutions for specific, real-world challenges faced by NASA researchers. Its newest contest, Asteroid Data Hunter, marks the start of a contest series that runs through August—the first contest series to contribute to NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge.
“Protecting the planet from the threat of asteroid impact means first knowing where they are,” said Jenn Gustetic, NASA Prizes and Challenges Program executive. “By opening up the search for asteroids, we are harnessing the potential of innovators and makers and citizen scientists everywhere to help solve this global challenge.” Through NASA's asteroid initiative, the agency seeks to enhance its ongoing work in the identification and characterization of near-Earth objects for further scientific investigation. This work includes locating potentially hazardous asteroids and identifying those viable for redirection to a stable lunar orbit for future exploration by astronauts. The Asteroid Grand Challenge, one part of the asteroid initiative, expands the agency's efforts beyond traditional boundaries and encourages partnerships and collaboration with a variety of organizations.
The Asteroid Data Hunter contest series will offer $35,000 in awards over the next six months to citizen scientists who develop improved algorithms that can be used to identify asteroids. Details about the competition can be found at the NASA website, as well as at the NTL's Asteroid Grand Challenge page.
