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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, college students arrive with their custom designed and built robots for NASA’s Fourth Annual Robotic Mining Competition, held May 20-24. The mining competition is coordinated by Kennedy Space Center’s Education Office for the agency’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Undergraduate and graduate students from 50 universities and colleges in the U.S. and around the world use their remote-controlled robots to maneuver and dig in a supersized sandbox filled with a crushed material called regolith that has characteristics similar to asteroids, moons of Mars and Mars itself. Photo credit: NASA_Jim Grossman