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

The American 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 using more than 100 terabytes of data accumulated by the agency. These data relating to telemetry of space devices, images of outer space, etc., have been accumulated over 30 years of NASA. And representatives of the agency do not have a good idea how to effectively use all these disparate data.

Therefore, it was decided not to search for such ideas ourselves, but to hold a competition to find such ideas among representatives of the IT sector. The agency does not need an idea in its bare form, on the contrary, it is about software, no matter what type of applications we are talking about, which will make the most efficient use of dead data (collected, moreover, for different purposes, and having different architectures and formats). It could 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.

Pupils, students, teachers and parents of students and pupils are invited to cooperate. Also, NASA will be glad to see among the participants in the competition toy developers and all other representatives of the IT sector. Data is provided absolutely free of charge; it can be found on the Planetary Data System (PDS) program website. The site itself can be found here at this link .

Winners of the competition receive interesting prizes, including cash prizes (up to the amount of 10 thousand dollars). Mentioning the winner the title of “Space Coder of the Galaxy 2012” is also mentioned. 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 student at the university).

Via topcoder.com