The NASA ORBIT (Opportunities in Research, Business, Innovation, and Technology for the Workforce) Challenge is a multi-phase, student-focused challenge designed to inspire and empower the next generation of innovators, engineers, entrepreneurs, and researchers.
Compete for cash prizes, receive mentorship from NASA experts, and present your work at an in-person showcase. Finalists gain access to an exclusive accelerator program designed to launch careers in STEM and entrepreneurship.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft captured images of the Moon’s surface on Oct 16, 2022, after flying by the Earth for its first of three gravity assists.
Crater rims are vital landmarks for planetary science and navigation. Yet detecting them in real imagery is tough, with shadows, lighting shifts, and broken edges obscuring their shape.
This project invites you to develop methods that can reliably fit ellipses to crater rims, helping advance future space exploration.
In the pursuit of next generation, terrain-based optical navigation, NASA is developing a system that will use a visible-light camera on a spacecraft to capture orbital images of lunar terrain and process the imagery to:
detect the crater rims in the images,
identify the craters from a catalog, and
estimate the camera/vehicle position based on the identified craters.
The focus of this project is the crater detection process.
Natural imagery varies significantly in lighting and will impact the completeness of crater rims in the images.
