UMD’s Winning Mars Settlement & Rover Designs Further School Record

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – NASA’s renowned Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts-Academic Linkages (RASC-AL) engineering design competitions offer two unique opportunities to university undergraduate and graduate teams to contribute solutions to some of NASA’s biggest challenges. University of Maryland teams have created more winning solutions to these challenges than any other school.

The RASC-AL engineering design competitions involve either (1) conceptual challenges such as human missions to other planetary bodies, or (2) physical challenges such as building tele-operated planetary rover prototypes or developing new material and wheel designs for the NASA Space Exploration Vehicle. UMD teams recently won both 2015 RASC-AL competitions, which are sponsored by NASA and organized by the National Institute of Aerospace.

Asimov City, Mars

For the RASC-AL conceptual design competition, student teams and their faculty advisors work to develop mission architectures that employ innovative designs in response to one of the four following themes: Earth Independent Mars Pioneering Architecture, Earth Independent Lunar Pioneering Architecture, Mars Moons Prospector Mission or Large Scale Mars Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) Pathfinder Mission.

The 2015 competition challenged students to design a mission with supporting technologies that would enable astronauts to be less reliant on resources transported from Earth. The UMD team, led by aerospace engineering professor David Akin and comprised of students in his Space Systems Design class, won first place overall with their Mars exploration themed project, Asimov City, Mars: Developing a Permanent Earth-Independent Settlement on Mars. The team also placed first in the undergraduate category.

Over the competition’s 14 years, UMD has won seven times and placed second five times in the overall, graduate, and/or undergraduate categories.

"Some of the teams had ideas that NASA might be able to use as we venture out beyond low-Earth orbit,” said Pat Troutman, Human Exploration Strategic Analysis lead at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia in a NASA press release about the 2015 competition. “The judges and I were impressed by the students' engineering skills and innovative thinking."

The UMD team designed the outline for a Mars settlement that incorporated the moon as a fueling stop for Mars-bound space craft, and they developed a strategy for creating fuel from lunar surface materials.

"This project taught me so much, not just about engineering, but about teamwork and systems integration," said Samantha Walters, one of the student leaders on 29 student team. "Having professionals tell us that what we did was so impressive felt really good."

The experience should serve Walters well. Her next step after graduating in August will be working for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory as an operations engineer.

Read more about this year’s winning planetary mission design team here.

Winning UMD Rover Sets Course Record

In the 2015 RASC-AL Exploration Robo-Ops Competition, UMD’s team beat out seven other universities to win first place. Robo-Ops is an engineering competition that challenges teams composed of both undergraduate and graduate students from different engineering disciplines to build a planetary rover prototype and demonstrate its capabilities through a series of field tests at the NASA Johnson Space Center’s Rock Yard in Houston.

UMD team's rover was designed, built and operated by students in Akin's Planetary Rover Development course. During competition, the UMD rover had to collect a variety of 'samples'—color coded rocks—while navigating a course that simulates rocky fields, lunar craters, sand dunes and a Mars hill. Teams could also earn bonus points for returning with the rocks to the starting point on top of Mars Hill, for collecting at least one rock from each of the four terrains and for acquiring an “alien life-form.”

"So many students stuck around after finals just to put in the extra time and effort to help improve [the rover] all the way up until [we] had to start driving it down to Texas," said aerospace engineering senior Lemuel Carpenter, who was head of the mechanical/structural team and served as part of the Texas pit crew. "It's always a nice feeling when all of your hours on a project pay off."

In addition to taking 1st place, the team and their rover set a new Rock Yard course record and won recognition for both the 'Best Climbing Ability' and the greatest reduction in the weight of a rover.

UMD has competed in all five years that the RASC-AL Robo-Ops competition has taken place – winning once and placing in the top three four out of those five years.

Read more about this year’s winning Robo-Ops team here.