NASA is using its NASA Tournament Lab on TopCoder to attack its galactic-scale pile of remote mission data. Over the years, NASA has accumulated over 100 terabytes of data from space missions, and the sheer size of the archive makes it difficult to manage the data and make it available.
Anyone can look at the archive at NASA's Planetary Data System website. What NASA would like someone to do is not only make that data more accessible for scientists, but also package it up for non-scientists to access and manipulate. The agency hopes that school children, teachers and parents, game designers, or almost anyone will hit up the database and find more uses for it than solely science. In a practical sense, the more people accessing the database, the better a case NASA can make for its worth to American society.
The prize is up to $10,000 (and the coveted crown for Space Coder of the Galaxy 2012) for "coders, mathematicians and creative thinkers" to brainstorm new ideas for NASA's planetary science data. You can find more details over at NASA's PDS Challenge home page.
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