›CanSat Competition 2010

The American Astronautical Society (AAS) and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) have organized an annual student design-build-launch competition for space-related topics. The competition is available to university and college students from the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. Although similar competitions exist for other fields of engineering (robots, radio-control airplanes, racing cars, etc.), most space-related competitions are paper design competitions. While these are worthwhile, they do not give students the satisfaction of being involved with the end-to-end life cycle of a complex engineering project, from conceptual design, through integration and test, actual operation of the system and concluding with a post-mission summary and debrief. This competition fulfills that need!

This annual competition allows teams from universities and colleges to design and build a space-type system, according to the specifications released by the competition organizing committee, and then compete against each at the end of two semesters to determine the winners.