NASA Wants Your Help In Determining If Mars Has Ever Had Life
NASA already has a handful of missions active on Mars, but the space agency and one of its partners wants your help in another. Together with HeroX, NASA is hoping to find someone who can crunch the numbers and determine if Mars has ever been able to support life at any point in its history
The goal is simple: create a tool that automatically analyzes the data NAZA manages to capture from Perseverance and Curiosity, the pair of rovers the agency currently has gathering data on the Red Planet.
"While sending these complex robots and their delicate instruments over 500 million kilometers through space and landing them autonomously on Mars are awe-inspiring feats of engineering, the challenges do not stop there," the HeroX page details. "Communication between rovers and Earth is severely constrained, with limited transfer rates and short daily communication windows. When scientists on Earth receive sample data from the rover, they must rapidly analyze them and make difficult inferences about the chemistry in order to prioritize the next operations and send those instructions back to the rover."
Your tool, model, or software will need to automatically analyze "mass spectrometry data" collected by the rovers. Should you want to compete in the contest, your model should be able to detect chemical compounds collected from Martian dirt and rock samples in search of the compounds needed for life.
It should be noted the contest isn't for nothing. The winning competitor will receive a cash prize upwards of $15,000 and potentially, you know, discover that alien life once existed on the fourth rock from the sun.
"A focus of this challenge is to feature a new dataset for research and to engage planetary geologists, analytical chemists, and data scientists in working with it," the contest description adds. "As with any research dataset like this one, initial algorithms may pick up on correlations that are incidental to the task. Solutions in this challenge are intended to serve as a starting point for continued research and development. The challenge organizers intend to make the data available online after the competition for ongoing improvement."
You can read more about the contest and its rules here.