NASA will soon host its annual engineering competition for university, college and high school students from around the globe.
About 100 student teams will be gathering in Alabama to compete in NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Competitors will be coming from all over the world, including Puerto Rico, Brazil, Germany, India and Mexico, as well as from 23 U.S. states.
The competition will present the students with challenges involving engineering problems similar to ones that NASA might experience during future explorations of Mars and beyond.
The teams, which consist of six students, are expected to design, build, test and race rovers using only human power. The rovers will be driven by one man and one woman from the team.
The half-mile obstacle course the teammates will face is made up of 17 tough challenges, which have been created to simulate terrain found on Mars, other planets, moons or asteroids. This will mean the team will need to maneuver obstacles such as craters, boulders, ridges, inclines, crevasses and depressions.
The competition has been designed to help students learn more about the design, construction and testing technology behind extraterrestrial exploration vehicles.
Diedra Williams, acting manager of Marshall’s Academic Affairs Office described the excitement of hosting the engineering design competition:
"The Rover Challenge allows for young talent to work together to solve complex engineering problems that include design, construction and testing. It is great fun – but also reflects the real-world complexity of problem solving with practical, hands-on experience. We look forward to seeing the enthusiasm and inventive ideas they bring to the competition."
The top three teams who finish the test course with the fastest times will win prizes, which will be awarded in different categories.
There will also be several additional awards presented from the competition including the AIAA Telemetry/Electronics Award, Featherweight Award, Neil Armstrong Best Design Award and a System Safety Award, among others.
Participants will also have the opportunity to try out a new challenge added to the event this year, the Drive Train Technology Challenge. In this optional competition feature, teams will be tasked with developing reliable systems such as belts, drive shafts or direct drives to replace commonly used chains. There will be cash prizes for the teams who do the best overall.
The weekend competition will wrap up with an awards ceremony where teams will be recognized by some of the corporate sponsors. Some of the categories of the awards will be best design, rookie team, and more.
The Rover Challenge is hosted jointly by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, located in Huntsville, Alabama, and the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, which is managed by the Marshall’s Academic Affairs Office. Major corporate sponsors of the competition include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Jacobs Engineering, Aerojet Rocketydyne and Northop Grunman.
The competition takes place from March 30 to April 1, 2017, at the Marshall Spaceflight Center.
For those interested in following the competition online there will be a live Twitter feed as well as a live stream of the competition.
To learn more about the competition, visit the NASA website.