We report below the original announcement text from JPL:

Dear Fellow Researchers,

We would like to announce the "6th Global Trajectory Optimisation Competition," organised this year by the Outer Planet Mission Analysis Group of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Instructions for registering for the competition are outlined below.

The competition was instituted in 2005 under the leadership of Dario Izzo of the Advanced Concepts Team, European Space Agency (Refs. 1 and 2), as a means of stimulating research in the rich area of spacecraft trajectory optimisation. The competitions have seen greater and greater participation over the five editions to date. They have proven to promote innovation and creativity in mission design. Following tradition, as winners of the last competition, we accept the honour of organising the competition this year.

The GTOC Trophee.

Participation in the competition will be nominally limited to the first forty researchers, or teams of researchers, who register. To register for the competition, simply contact me, preferably by email, at the particulars given below, by 08 September 2012, including in the email a point of contact and the names and institutional affiliations of the researchers in the team. Feel free to pass on this announcement to other researchers you believe may be interested. The competition will be to find the "best" solution to an interplanetary spacecraft trajectory optimisation problem which will be disclosed on 10 September 2012. Solutions must be returned within four weeks in an ASCII text format which will be specified. Solutions will be first verified and then ranked on the basis of the objective function which was specified for the problem.

A workshop to discuss results and methodologies will be held on 29 October 2012, in conjunction with the 23rd ISSFD in Pasadena (Ref. 3). It will not be necessary to pay the ISSFD registration fee, or any other fee, to participate in the GTOC6 workshop. One advantage of having the workshop close to the competition is that all the methods will still be fresh in the teams' minds. Teams are encouraged to make travel plans regardless of their ranking, which should be available by mid October. Selection of presenting teams will be based not only on the solutions but also on other criteria such as the creativity and perceived potential of the methods used.

Summary of important dates: