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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln prepare their custom robot 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