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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_deflection_strategies
It means you're at something of a crossroads in your acting career and have been invited to feature in a particularly terrible Michael Bay disaster movie.
It starts with about 10k asteroids. By the end there's 10k being added every month.
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
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.
"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...
