Space Station Contest Lets Students Program Satellites

After controlling small satellites in the International Space Station on Friday morning, two teams of high school students took home top prizes for their programming skills.

The teams were part of the Zero Robotics SPHERES Challenge, an annual competition that asks students to program bowling ball-size satellites to perform maneuvers related to current space-exploration problems. This year's competitors had to mimic cleaning up broken satellites and other unwanted debris humans have put into orbit around the Earth, but haven't brought back down again. Such "space junk" increases every year, which is a problem for new satellites that people want to put into space.

The student-written pr…
Continue reading...

More About: International Space Station, programming, satellite, space