NASA (www.nasa.gov) has awarded more than $39.8 million through its National Space Grant College and Fellowship Project to ‘increase student and faculty engagement in STEM at community colleges, technical schools and universities across the USA’. Each award has a ‘four-year performance period’.

NASA awarded funds to 52 ‘proposals aimed at attracting and retaining more students from institutions of higher education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics programmes’.

Each selected submission is aimed at helping NASA to realise its aims of: building a diverse and skilled future STEM workforce; and strengthening an understanding of STEM ‘through powerful connections at NASA’.

One example of this NASA initiative is the Nebraska Space Grant Consortium continuing to offer project-based learning opportunities to students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

As part of the programme, participating college students will be able to compete in the Lunabotic challenge at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Working in teams, they will be tasked with creating an operational robot to demonstrate techniques and technology for mining minerals on the Moon — a real-world problem that NASA must solve in its Moon to Mars exploration initiative and its Artemis programme.