The challenges were created by NASA's Tournament Lab in collaboration with crowdsourcing platform HeroX.
The first challenge, Waste to Base Materials Challenge: Sustainable Reprocessing in Space, is seeking solutions to the problems caused by waste generated in space. Long spaceflights such as those to Mars, which for a round trip would take at least 12 to 18 months, would generate a lot of waste. Each submission for the challenge will be evaluated based on how it handles four categories: trash, fecal waste, foam packaging material, and carbon dioxide processing.
"This is exactly what our crowd is poised to do: solve intractable problems with an eye for efficiency and sustainability. I am eager to see the submissions," said HeroX President & CEO Kal K. Sahota.
The other incentive challenge is the NASA Air-athon Challenge, which seeks air-quality monitoring solutions, in the face of growing levels of air pollution and climate change. There is currently no single system that provides high-quality data on-demand regarding surface-level air pollutants, so NASA and HeroX have launched DrivenData.
"This is a difficult problem where better data tools can provide timely information to millions of people to help them protect their health. The challenge will test solutions from a global community of experts, with the best approaches automatically rising to the top of the leaderboard," said DrivenData co-founder and head of Business Development Greg Lipstein.
