
NASA launches $35,000 bounty for improved asteroid detection algorithms - benjoffe
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/march/be-an-asteroid-hunter-in-nasas-first-asteroid-grand-challenge-contest-series/
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throwaway_frown
I'm happy to see NASA continuing its tradition of reaching beyond traditional
communities to work on hard problems (e.g., its prior Glove challenge). Used
correctly, these competitions hold the promise to help engage the public,
source novel innovations, and save the government money (plus be fun!).

 _BUT_ , as somebody who recently participated in a DoD-sponsored contest that
was rife with improprieties, bias, and incompetence (the government
effectively threw away the rule book in making the reward), please be careful
in reviewing the rules and verifying that the administrators of this are
accountable. Regardless of if the amount at stake is $50K or $1M, bureaucrats
have an astonishing capacity for rationalizing whatever outcome they choose or
stumble into.

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Strilanc
A related video, showing orbits of asteroids discovered over time:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJsUDcSc6hE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJsUDcSc6hE)

It starts with about 10k asteroids. By the end there's 10k being added every
month.

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bberrry
How in the world do you differentiate between so many asteroids?

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bfe
"... This approach will discover new asteroids and improve our model of the
solar system. It also opens opportunities for interesting algorithmic
challenges, and the chance for a normal person to discover an asteroid.

"As a programmer, I’m particularly interested in how we’ll improve algorithms
to spot asteroids. I am sure that there are conventional ML techniques and
even simpler image processing approaches that are not being sufficiently
exploited." [1]

That's Ian Webster talking about Asterank [2], which might be relevant
background here since this NASA project is in partnership with Planetary
Resources, which acquired Asterank.

1\. [http://www.ianww.com/blog/2013/11/26/asterank-discover-
revie...](http://www.ianww.com/blog/2013/11/26/asterank-discover-
reviews-100000th-image/)

2\. [http://www.asterank.com/discover](http://www.asterank.com/discover)

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cviedmai
Maybe I'm just a bit too cynical (negative?), but I find it rather sad that,
lets say to improve a movie recommendation algorithm we have a $1M bounty
(Netflix price), while to improve an algorithm to detect the possible
destruction of earth we have a bounty of $35K.

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theklub
Nasa needs it own kickstarter-ish website.

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k0
Just use dinosaurs...

Algorithm or technique? The press release is quite vague (I did not check
through the links). Are we talking laser, infrared, visible spectrum, or
fruity pebbles algos? What if a pure black object is occluding known stars?
What if there is some ice on the same black object? Is the algo meant to be
run directly on a satellite (Hubble, Kepler, etc.) or from a terrestrial
observatory?

Break it into knowns, then unknowns.

k0

~~~
Zikes
> competitors can create an account on the contest series website and _learn
> more_ about the rules and different phases of the contest series by going
> to: [http://bit.ly/AsteroidHunters](http://bit.ly/AsteroidHunters)

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goblin89
> 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 redirection idea sounds really awesome and incredibly
complicated. Is it what NASA plans to do in case we have one heading straight
at us? Do we have to blow up those that can't be redirected? What exactly does
“viable for redirection” mean?

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adrianN
There is a long Wikipedia article about the topic:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_deflection_strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_deflection_strategies)

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guyzmo
well here's a way of detecting asteroids:
[http://www.atari.com/arcade/asteroids](http://www.atari.com/arcade/asteroids)
can I get the $35k? :-p

