Crowd-sourced technical competitions have been increasingly attracting savvy programmers, eager to take on a big challenge or win a little prize money. But an ew contest announced today offers something else that no open competition has had before: the chance to see their algorithms play out in space.

That’s the premise behind the Autonomous Space Capture Challenge sponsored by DARPA and NASA and run by the MIT Space Systems Laboratory, TopCoder, and Aurora Flight Sciences. The programmable tournament will invite coders to write a computer program that enables a satellite to dock with a space object that is tumbling through space. The competition builds off the work of DARPA’s Phoenix Program, which seeks to send up nano-satellites that can attach to non-functioning satellites and re-harvest them as part of a new space system.
via GigaOM

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