scope:

APPLICABILITY

a. This NPD applies to NASA Headquarters and NASA Centers, including Component Facilities and Technical and Service Support Centers, other contractors, grant recipients, or parties to agreements only to the extent specified or referenced in the appropriate contracts, grants, or agreements.

b. Consistent with (a) above, this NPD applies to all challenges, prize competitions, and crowdsourcing activities funded by NASA and open to NASA civil servant, contractor, and public participation.

c. This NPD applies to student-focused challenges insofar as the challenge is designed as a competition for students of a designated age or academic level to provide solutions to problems of interest to NASA, and placements and/or awards made are based on solutions provided. This NPD does not apply to hands-on learning activities where there is no intent on NASA's part to incorporate the participants' work into the Agency's or the general body of scientific or technical knowledge or to apply that knowledge.

d. This NPD does not apply to grand challenges. However, where individual challenges, prize competitions, or crowdsourcing activities contribute to a grand challenge, those individual activities are covered by this policy.

e. This policy does not apply to citizen science activities except when those activities are conducted in conjunction with a challenge, prize competition, or crowdsourcing activity.

f. In this NPD, all mandatory actions (i.e., requirements) are denoted by statements containing the term "shall." The terms "may" or "can" denote discretionary privilege or permission, "should" denotes a good practice and is recommended, but not required, "will" denotes expected outcome, and "are" or "is" denote descriptive material.

g. In this NPD, all document citations are assumed to be the latest version unless otherwise noted.