KSC-2014-3543

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex Spaceperson poses for a photo with Carver Middle School students and their teacher from Orlando, Florida, during the Zero Robotics finals competition at NASA Kennedy Space Center's Space Station Processing Facility in Florida. The team, members of the After School All-Stars, were regional winners and advanced to the final competition. For the competition, students designed software to control Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, and competed with other teams locally. The Zero Robotics is a robotics programming competition where the robots are SPHERES. The competition starts online, where teams program the SPHERES to solve an annual challenge. After several phases of virtual competition in a simulation environment that mimics the real SPHERES, finalists are selected to compete in a live championship aboard the space station. Students compete to win a technically challenging game by programming their strategies into the SPHERES satellites. The programs are autonomous and the students cannot control the satellites during the test. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper