Description: The goal of the Flight Opportunities program's Suborbital Testing Environments for Promising Payloads (STEPP) Prize is to identify technologies of significant interest to NASA and facilitate suborbital flight testing to advance the technology and reduce risk for future missions. The Flight Opportunities program is seeking administrative support for conducting this NASA prize competition. It is envisioned that this prize competition will be conducted between 1 to 2 times per year. Visit https://www.nasatechleap.org/ for more information about prize progress.
The Autonomous Observation Challenge No. 1 invites individuals, teams, and organizations to submit applications for integrated, compact precision pointing systems for small spacecraft that can be used to autonomously detect, locate, track, and collect data on transient terrestrial events, such as aerosol dispersion in the atmosphere or maintain line of sight communication with an object on the lunar surface. The expectation is that the technology will be demonstrated using a suborbital vehicle at the end of the challenge.