SPHERES Facility Aboard The ISS for STEM Educational Purposes

“NASA/HQ has a requirement for Support Services for the ZERO Robotics competition. The ZERO Robotics competition enables high-school students to participate in the SPHERES (Synchronized Position Hold Engage Re-orient Experimental Satellite) program by writing their own algorithms to solve a problem provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team. The pilot program involves two high schools that will compete against each other during a test session that will be conducted aboard the ISS during the winter of 2009-2010. The contractor will support the pilot program to completion and evaluate its results, setting clear and realistic objectives for a potential national program to start in the Fall of 2010 or 2011. The Government intends to purchase the services from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). MIT is uniquely qualified to perform this pilot program and provide support engineering because they created the SPHERES program and hold proprietary ownership of the data.” More