Artist's rendering of NASA's Europa mission spacecraft. (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.)
Since its inception more than a year ago, NASA’s proposed mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa has captured our imaginations.
With the promise of a vast ocean hidden beneath its icy surface, dreams of exploration revolve around the search for possible signs of extraterrestrial underwater life.
But the nature of Europa’s geology poses challenges that will require a great deal of research and development to make exploration of this icy world possible.
The two key aspects of this, of course, are that any exploration vehicle will need to be able to survive a long journey through space, and will require the ability to operate and perform tasks for long durations submerged underwater.
Innovation is needed here, and what better way than encouraging young engineering students to try their hand at designing the vehicle that might be the one to discover life beyond Earth?
The Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center’s annual competition is one such initiative. The MATE competition aims to further the development of underwater robotics by challenging engineering students around the world to design and build underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) that can perform complex tasks beneath the surface of the ocean.
From Ocean to Outer Space
Of course, there isn’t a way to actually explore an extraterrestrial ocean just yet. But the MATE competition involves both a space-based component and an ocean-based component that offers real-world tasks analogous to the operations of a mission to Europa.
The focus of this year’s MATE competition is developing ROVs that can serve this dual purpose of both ocean and space exploration.
Students and their ROV. (Image courtesy of the Marine Advanced Technology Education Center.)
For the ocean-themed missions, teams must have their ROV perform a variety of tasks related to preparing an underwater oil wellhead for decommission and turning it into an artificial coral reef. The mission tasks that teams must complete include:
- Finding and recovering equipment from the sea floor
- Collecting and analyzing oil samples, and returning the samples to the surface
- Photographing corals and collecting coral samples to return to the surface for analysis
- Attaching and securing a flange and cap to the wellhead
The space-themed aspect of the competition focuses on developing an ROV that can survive the journey through space, as well as being capable of navigating beneath the ice sheet of Europa. Operations would include collecting data such as temperature, ocean depth and ice-thickness measurements, as well as deploying and connecting power and communications equipment.
Like most student design-and-build challenges, all teams are required to create and submit technical documents on their ROV and make presentations to a panel of expert space and ocean exploration judges.
Teams will be evaluated on their design, construction and operational performance of the ROV, as well as the team’s ability to communicate what they learned throughout the competition and how they put their knowledge to use while designing and building their ROV.
ROV Final Competition in the World’s Largest Swimming Pool
Regional events took place earlier this year, and now all that’s left is the final competition that is set to take place June 23-25, 2016, at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL). At 202 feet long, 102 feet wide and 40 feet deep, and with a capacity of 6.2 million gallons, the NBL is currently the world’s largest swimming pool, normally used to train astronauts for spacewalks and other zero-gravity space tasks.
This year has seen a record number of participants, with hundreds of students in more than 70 teams from around the world. As with similar competitions, the MATE competition aims to encourage students of all ages and education levels to pursue STEM and develop the technical and problem solving skills necessary for the technology and engineering careers of the future.
For more on the mission to explore Europa’s oceans, visit NASA’s mission website. If you want to follow along with the MATE Center’s ROV competition finals, check out their website.