NASA announced its First Asteroid Grand Challenge Contest series worth $35,000 calling on citizen scientists to develop algorithms for identifying asteroids.

The contest series will be conducted by NASA's Tournament Laboratory in partnership with Planetary Resources and will be held over the next six months. Prior to the start of the first contest, to be held March 17, participants need to visit this website and create an account for themselves. The website also contains information about the rules and different phases of the contest series.

"For the past three years, NASA has been learning and advancing the ability to leverage distributed algorithm and coding skills through the NASA Tournament Lab to solve tough problems," said Jason Crusan, NASA Tournament Lab director in a press statement. "We are now applying our experience with algorithm contests to helping protect the planet from asteroid threats through image analysis."

According to the "Create Marathon Match Problem Statement" homepage, the space agency is looking for an algorithm that can improve Near-Earth Object (NEO) detection and "reject false positives from a list of asteroid detections." The first place prize is $1,275, with a $255 reliability bonus, and the second place prize is $638.

Citizen scientists participating in the contest must create an algorithm based on four images of the sky from ground-based telescope. According to NASA, "The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computer systems." The first place prize is $1,275, with a $255 reliability bonus, and the second place prize is $638.

The contest series is being conducted to facilitate earlier detection of a potential threat from asteroids. The new asteroid initiative by NASA will also help build public awareness.

NASA's asteroid initiative includes plans for a redirect mission as well as a future mission to capture a near-Earth asteroid and collect samples. The Grand Challenge is the space agency's attempt to discover all potential asteroid threats. The first contest ends on April 2 with the next contest scheduled for April 4.