In the Astrophysics program, each team takes a series of images of a near-earth asteroid, then writes software to calculate its orbit and predict its future path.

In the Genomics program, each team grows a culture of Vibrio natriegens under moderate antibiotic selection pressure.

[2] Past guest speakers have included Maarten Schmidt, who has done pioneering work in quasars; Richard Feynman, a Nobel laureate in physics; James Randi, magician and debunker of pseudoscience; Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development; Paul MacCready, creator of the Gossamer Condor and Gossamer Albatross; and Eric Allin Cornell, a Nobel laureate in physics.

Need-based financial aid grants are available to cover part or all of the fee, with SSP guaranteeing to meet all demonstrated need.

[4][5][6][7] The program was established in 1959 at The Thacher School in Ojai, California, as a response to the launch of Sputnik 1 and the start of the Space Race.

The Headmaster at Thacher was concerned that the country's top high school students were not being adequately informed and inspired about careers in the physical sciences.

He decided to create an intense summer program to challenge such students and give them a taste of "doing real science," with assistance from Caltech, UCLA, Claremont Colleges, and Stanford.

The students were excited to find that when they calculated the orbit of 9 Metis, their data resulted in a significant correction to the Russian ephemeris.

[10] In 2016, following three years of planning and preparation, a pilot of the first SSP in Biochemistry was held at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

[11] For the first 50 years of the program, students took photographic images of main-belt asteroids (between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter).

The measured asteroid coordinates (not the calculated orbital elements) are submitted to the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.