South Dakota State University students competed at the highest level in two NASA competitions.
Both teams performed well, with one group taking home third place.
The NASA Break the Ice Lunar Challenge took place in Huntsville, Alabama, while the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage – or “RASCAL” – competition was in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
The contests challenged students and organizations to develop technologies to aid potential research on the moon.
SDSU was well-represented, with a team in both competitions. Both built upon previous work done in past competitions creating rovers designed to be used on the moon.
In the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, students actually built two new rovers to compete against companies worldwide. The first rover was an "excavator" rover designed to be able to dig up materials in the icy regolith material in a moon crater. The second was a "Dump truck" rover that collected the materials taken from the moon crater.
NASA tested the rovers in Huntsville and announced winners. Although South Dakota was not named a finalist, the team was one of 10 runner-ups to win $25,000 for their contributions.
Todd Letcher is the faculty adviser of the team. He said participating was invaluable experience for the students.
“This wasn’t meant to be for university teams, but they allowed university teams to participate. And you get to compete against professional aerospace engineers who have been doing this for decades. And that was really exciting to see what our students could do,” Letcher said.
In the RASCAL competition, SDSU won best prototype award and placed third in overall.
Letcher said the placement was particularly exciting.
“There was no third place to give out. It was a new award that they added because second and third place were just so close, basically statistically tied. They said it was too close to not give SDSU an award, so they created a new award for this year only and gave them third place,” Letcher said.
The students were tasked with creating a rover that could go down into steep craters on the south pole-side of the moon in order to retrieve materials from above and underneath the ground.
SDSU's overall project was titled Prospecting Observation System for Exploration, Investigation, Discovery and Navigation.
The prototype was a one-tenth size of an actual lunar rover.
