NASA Announces OpenNEX Challenges

NextGov (6/25, Brewin, 2K) reports NASA, well known as an innovator, announced the Open NASA Earth Exchange (OpenNEX) challenges, a two-phased project that asks the public to come up with new ways to make use of the extensive datasets its Earth science satellites capture. Rama Nemani, principal scientist for the NEX project at the Ames Research Center, said, These challenges allow citizen-scientists to realize the value of NASA data assets and offers NASA new ideas on how to share and use that data. According to the article, another benefit of the project is that it tackles policy mandates on big data, open data and climate data from the Obama administration. Overall, the goal of OpenNEXis to maximize the use of this data, according to Tsengar Lee, program manager in the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate, who said, The expectation was if you build the data, they will come, but that was not the case.