NASA named a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as the first prize winner for Phase 2 of the agency’s LunaRecycle Challenge, which focused on developing solutions for reducing waste during missions to the Moon or deep space by recycling common materials, like fabrics, plastics, foam, and metals. The Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek (CERBERUZ) team, comprised of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students at MIT, received a total of $775,000 in awards. The technology grinds mixed trash into a fine powder, […]
NASA will announce the winners of the final phase of its LunaRecycle Challenge on Friday, Aug. 28, at The University of Alabama (UA) Lee Styslinger College of Engineering in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Launched in 2024, the challenge incentivizes the invention of new recycling systems that could support non-metabolic waste management efforts for future lunar missions. Media […]
The Orbital Clarity Challenge — the sixth in the NASA TechLeap Prize series — is a collaborative effort between NASA’s Heliophysics Division, Flight Opportunities program, and Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation. The Heliophysics Division studies space weather, including how it heats and expands Earth’s outer atmosphere during intense solar activity, creating orbital drag through atmospheric density changes. The […]
NASA’s next Gateways to Blue Skies competition invites collegiate teams to imagine innovative new ways aircraft could inspect land-based infrastructure, such as bridges and tunnels, to improve safety, reliability, and costs by 2035 or sooner. Infrastructure is the foundation of the nation’s strong economy, global competitiveness, and daily quality of life. When that infrastructure is […]
As NASA prepares to establish the Moon Base, advancing surface mobility will be key to helping crews and robotic systems travel farther across the lunar surface. To help advance that capability, the Rock and Roll with NASA Challenge invited public innovators to design and build next-generation lunar rover wheels. Five teams from 128 submissions and 49 countries advanced to the final phase of the […]
NASA is asking U.S.-based collegiate teams to submit bold, original concepts to the 2027 edition of a student challenge focused on aerospace innovation that could help the agency envision a future on the Moon shaped by new technology. The latest NASA Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition invites student teams to explore new operations paradigms and advance the technologies needed to […]
NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) assists in the use of crowdsourcing across the federal government. CoECI’s NASA Tournament Lab offers the contract capability to run external crowdsourced challenges on behalf of NASA and other agencies. Sponsored by the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), a division of the U.S. Department of […]
NASA announced the Massachusetts Institute of Technology project, Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm, as the first place winner for the 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition, which challenges students to bridge gaps in aerospace technology by innovating new system concepts and prototypes. Another team from the same university won second place overall for their project, Mars Exploration Layered Infrastructure for Operations, Research, and Advancement, while Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University took third place with the Mars […]
The Fly Foundational Robots (FFR) mission will launch a robotic arm, with seven degrees of freedom, to low Earth orbit. NASA is opening access to the robotic arm to a select group of U.S. researchers — principal investigators, post-doctoral researchers, professors, and highly qualified graduate students — who have a compelling experiment and the capability […]
NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) assists in the use of crowdsourcing across the federal government. CoECI’s NASA Tournament Lab offers the contract capability to run external crowdsourced challenges on behalf of NASA and other agencies. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Nutrition Research (ONR) invites U.S.-based, accredited, non-profit academic institutions […]