NASA holds a competition of ideas for the effective use of its own data

The US space agency NASA recently decided to hold a competition among representatives of the IT sector in general and programmers in particular. The essence of the competition is the search for interesting ideas on the use of more than 100 terabytes of data accumulated by the agency. These data relating to the telemetry of space devices, images of outer space, etc., accumulated over 30 years of NASA. And representatives of the agency do not yet have a good idea how to effectively use all these scattered data.

Therefore, it was decided not to look for such ideas by ourselves, but to hold a competition to find such ideas among representatives of the IT sphere. The idea in the bare form is not needed by the agency, on the contrary - it’s about the software, no matter what type of applications it’s about, which will make the most efficient use of the data lying dead (collected, moreover, for different purposes, and having different architecture and formats). It can be a program for a mobile device, or a web service, or something else. The main condition is that the software must be original and useful.
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Schoolchildren, students, teachers and parents of students and pupils are invited to cooperate. NASA will also be glad to see among the participants of the contest of toy developers and all other representatives of the IT industry. The data is provided absolutely free of charge, they can be found on the Planetary Data System (PDS) program website. The site itself is here for this link .

Winners of the competition receive interesting prizes, including cash prizes (up to the sum of 10 thousand dollars). Mention is also given to awarding the winner the title of "Space Coder of the Galaxy 2012". And finally, one of the winners will receive an invitation to work at NASA (although in the latter case there is a condition - the winner must be a university student).

Via topcoder.com