The NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science is preparing to open its International Space Station Longeron Challenge to competitors.
The goal of the challenge is to position the solar collectors on the International Space Station to generate as much power as possible during the most difficult orbital positions. The solar collectors are arranged in two groups of four Solar Array Wings (SAW). Each group is rotated by a joint called a Solar Alpha Rotary Joint (SARJ). Within each group, each of the four SAWs is rotated by a joint called a Beta Gimbal Assembly (BGA). It is your job to specify the angular position and velocity of these ten joints at each minute of the 92 minute orbit. In addition, you are allowed to adjust the orientation of the entire station by a small amount (which stays constant for the entire orbit).
Registration will be open to any interested participants. Details and updates can be found at the NTL challenge website: http://www.topcoder.com/iss/
NASA, Harvard Business School, and TopCoder have established the NASA Tournament Lab, which will enable the TopCoder community to compete amongst each other to create the most innovative, most efficient, and most optimized solutions for specific, real-world challenges being faced by NASA researchers.
