NASA Robotic Mining Competition 2015

Written by Nathan Smith on January 22, 2015. Posted in Grants & Contests.

The Sixth Annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition will be held at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center May 18-22, 2015. NASA’s Robotic Mining Competition is for university-level students, enrolled in a U.S. college or university. Teams are challenged to design and build a mining robot that can traverse the simulated Martian chaotic terrain, excavate Martian regolith and deposit the regolith into a collector bin within 10 minutes. There is particular relevance to NASA’s recently announced mission to find an asteroid by 2016 and then bring it to cislunar space. NASA will directly benefit from the competition by encouraging the development of innovative excavation concepts from universities, which may result in ideas and solutions that could be applied to an actual excavation device or payload.

The winning team will receive the Joe Kosmo Award for Excellence trophy, KSC launch invitations, team certificates for each member and a monetary team scholarship. Awards for other categories include monetary team scholarships, a school trophy or plaque, team and individual certificates, and KSC launch invitations.

Design teams must include at least one college or university faculty member and at least two undergraduate or graduate students. NASA has not set an upper limit on team members. A team should have a sufficient number of members to successfully operate their mining robot. Teams will compete in up to five major competition categories, including onsite mining, systems engineering paper, outreach project, slide presentation and demonstration (optional) and team spirit (optional).

Registration opened on Sept. 3, 2014, and is limited to 50 teams.

For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/centers/kennedy/technology/nasarmc.html.

Follow the NASA Robotic Mining Competition on Twitter at https://twitter.com/NASARMC.

Questions about this opportunity should be directed to Bethanné Hull at Bethanne.Hull@nasa.gov.

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Nathan Smith

Nathan Smith is Director of Technology for the College of Education and Human Services at Utah State University. In that role, he also directs The Adele & Dale Young Education Technology Center (The YETC) located in room 170 of the Education Building on Utah State University's Logan campus. The YETC is a combination student openaccess computer facility, a K12 curriculum materials library, a NASA Educator Resource Center for Utah, and a technology training center. Nathan served eight years (20042012) on the Board of Directors for the Utah Coalition for Education Technology (UCET) He was reelected in 2014 to serve another two year term on the board. A former elementary school teacher, Nathan has taught students every age from young children to senior citizens. He has had the opportunity beginning in 2011 to train international high school teachers from all over the world about technology in education, through the U.S. State