NASA wants you to participate in the Asteroid Grand Challenge Contest series. The space agency is offering a total of $35,000 over the next six months for "Asteroid Hunters" who could develop algorithms for identifying asteroids.

People who wish to take part in the first Asteroid Grand Challenge Contest, to be held March 17, can create an account on this website. The contest will be conducted by NASA's Tournament Laboratory and Planetary Resources. First prize is $1,275 and the second place prize is $638. The contest will take place over a period of six months.

According to the "Create Marathon Match Problem Statement" homepage, the contest is open for people who can develop algorithms that can help detect Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). The first contest ends April, 2.

 "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, according to a news release. "We are now applying our experience with algorithm contests to helping protect the planet from asteroid threats through image analysis."

The winning solution, according to NASA, will be able to minimize the number of false positives and increase detection sensitivity. Also, the algorithm should be able to ignore faults in data and  be able to run on all computers.

According to Chris Lewicki, President and Chief Engineer of the asteroid mining company. Planetary Resources Inc., currently, just one percent of all objects that orbit the Sun are tracked by scientists. The new algorithms are expected to widen this search and hunt for potential threats.

 "Protecting the planet from the threat of asteroid impact means first knowing where they are," said Jenn Gustetic, Prizes and Challenges Program executive. "By opening up the search for asteroids, we are harnessing the potential of innovators and makers and citizen scientists everywhere to help solve this global challenge.

NASA's FY2014 budget includes a plan to capture an asteroid using robots and send it to a safe orbit near earth. Scientists could obtain samples from this asteroid to study deep space.