Crater rims are vital landmarks for planetary science and navigation. Yet detecting them in real imagery is tough, with shadows, lighting shifts, and broken edges obscuring their shape. This project invites you to develop methods that can reliably fit ellipses to crater rims, helping advance future space exploration. In the pursuit of next generation, terrain-based […]
Category: Prizes, Challenges, & Crowdsourcing News
NASA Launches 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies Competition
NASA’s 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies competition invites collegiate teams to conceptualize innovative systems and practices that would advance current commercial aircraft maintenance, repair, and operations with the goal to enhance resilience, safety, and efficiency. The commercial aviation industry is a crucial component of the U.S. economy, employing millions and supporting global commerce and […]
NASA Challenge Winners Cook Up New Industry Developments
NASA invests in technologies that have the potential to revolutionize space exploration, including the way astronauts live in space. Through the Deep Space Food Challenge, NASA, in partnership with CSA (Canadian Space Agency), sought novel food production systems that could provide long-duration human space exploration missions with safe, nutritious, and tasty food. Three winners selected […]
NASA Seeks Moon and Mars Innovations Through University Challenge
NASA is calling on the next generation of collegiate innovators to imagine bold new concepts l pushing the boundaries of human exploration on the Moon, Mars, and beyond through the agency’s 2026 NASA Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition. The RASC-AL challenge fuels innovation for aerospace systems concepts, analogs, and technology […]
NASA’s Lunar Rescue System Challenge Supports Astronaut Safety
by Dary Felix Garcia NASA is preparing to make history by sending humans to the Moon’s South Pole. There, astronauts will conduct moonwalks for exploration, science experiments, and prepare humanity for the journey to Mars. Missions of this scale require extensive planning, especially when accounting for emergency scenarios such as a crew member becoming incapacitated. […]
Top Prize Awarded in Lunar Autonomy Challenge to Virtually Map Moon’s Surface
NASA named Stanford University of California winner of the Lunar Autonomy Challenge, a six-month competition for U.S. college and university student teams to virtually map and explore using a digital twin of NASA’s In-Situ Resource Utilization Pilot Excavator (IPEx). The winning team successfully demonstrated the design and functionality of their autonomous agent, or software that performs […]
NASA Selects 14 Finalist Teams for the 2025 RASC-AL Competition
Fourteen university teams have been selected as finalists for NASA’s 2025 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Competition. This year’s competition invited undergraduate and graduate students from across the nation to develop new, innovative concepts to improve our ability to operate on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Finalists will present their proposed concepts to […]