Botball is expanding in various ways this season:
A new Facebook registration - Botball Educational Robotics Program; A new website, Botball Community, social network for current and former Botball participants, New regional venues in Denver, Tucson, and Chicago, as well as in Austria and Qatar.
For 2012 team registration, as well as the schedules and regional venues, educator resources - software - the latest twitter, and sign-up for the newsletter, or to see video archives of past games, check the main Botball website.
The 2012 FIRST Robotics Competition Kick off took place on January 7th, 2012 at 10:30AM EST. Archived content is available by following the link below.
An engine firing on Jan. 11 will be the biggest maneuver that NASA's Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft will perform on its flight between Earth and Mars.
The action will use a choreographed sequence of firings of eight thruster engines during a period of about 175 minutes beginning at 3 p.m. PST (6 p.m. EST or 2300 Universal Time). It will redirect the spacecraft more precisely toward Mars to land at Gale Crater. The trajectory resulting from the mission's Nov. 26, 2011, launch intentionally misses Mars to prevent the upper stage of the launch vehicle from hitting the planet. That upper stage was not cleaned the way the spacecraft itself was to protect Mars from Earth's microbes.
The maneuver is designed to impart a velocity change of about 12.3 miles per hour (5.5 meters per second).
The 2012 FIRST Robotics Competition Sponsorship award winners have now been selected. To view if your team has been selected, follow the link below. For those teams that have won an award, please complete the entrance survey below.
Update:We have just announced the 2012 NASA House Team Winners! Check out the teams that made the list and find more about NASA House Teams!
NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found bright veins of a mineral, apparently gypsum, deposited by water. Analysis of the vein will help improve understanding of the history of wet environments on Mars.
The vein examined most closely by Opportunity is about the width of a human thumb (0.4 to 0.8 inch, or 1 to 2 centimeters), 16 to 20 inches (40 to 50 centimeters) long, and protrudes slightly higher than the bedrock on either side of it. Observations by the durable rover reveal this vein and others like it within an apron surrounding a segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater. None like it were seen in the 20 miles (33 kilometers) of crater-pocked plains that Opportunity explored for 90 months before it reached Endeavour, nor in the higher ground of the rim.
As you may have noticed there is now a Twitter feed on the right side of the Robotic Alliance Project's webpage! We would like to invite everyone to follow us on twitter and help spread the word about the Robotics Alliance Project and NASA! We plan on using Twitter to post about announcements, new features, and much more!
+ NASA Home Page
