Exactly. I got excited about this when I heard about it a few months back because I was in the middle of developing something that uses data from the PDS, but 1

Exactly. I got excited about this when I heard about it a few months back because I was in the middle of developing something that uses data from the PDS, but 1) the prize money was tiny compared to the effort and 2) TopCoder claims ownership of all submissions. As I read it, that means you give up all rights to the work. Not acceptable. I emailed some folks at NASA about it, but got no response.