NASA Announces Computer Algorithm Contest

A new NASA Asteroid Grand Challenge Series competition has been posted on TopCoder. The task of the competition is to help solve the problem of asteroids, which can crash into the Earth and destroy the human race. Specifically, programmers are required to develop new asteroid recognition algorithms for images from terrestrial telescopes.

The NASA competition begins on March 17th. The project was launched jointly with a private company Planetary Resources, which is going to extract minerals from asteroids.

The winner should improve recognition accuracy and reduce the number of false positives, as well as work efficiently on computers under all operating systems. Although this is not stated in the conditions of the competition, it is quite possible that preference will be given to distributed computing projects, since NASA already has experience in successful crowdsourcing projects. So, last year, NASA offered amateur astronomers to study clusters of stars in photographs taken from the Hubble telescope.
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