SCS Engineers proudly sponsors the 2021-2022 California State University Long Beach (CSULB) NASA RMC team: The Space Sharks, participating in NASA’s upcoming LUNABOTIC competition. The annual NASA LUNABOTICS competition is a hands-on engineering exercise where students receive practical experience in the full engineering lifecycle process from concept development to system closeout.
This Artemis Student Challenge trains university students in the methods of NASA systems engineering while designing, building, and operating an exciting lunar excavator prototype. The Space Sharks are composed of passionate students from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. They are a collaborative team of students from all disciplines and grade levels working towards the ultimate goal of achieving first place in the NASA Lunabotics Competition. The goal is for each member to work in a team setting to design, build, and execute a shopping-cart-sized rover.
According to NASA, rovers need to be compact, lightweight, and rugged to launch with minimum cost but withstand the rigors of terrestrial mining operations in difficult-to-reach or dangerous locations. NASA desires excavation in future space missions for In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) to make local commodities, such as propellants and breathing air, and pursue construction operations on the Moon, Mars, an asteroid, or a comet in the future.
Over nine months, Space Sharks will go through the engineering processes to design, build, and test a robot rover that can mine for regolith autonomously. It will be necessary to excavate lunar regolith to extract local resources, maintaining a sustainable presence on the Moon, so they don’t have to be transported from Earth through its deep gravity well.
Check out their efforts here: Teaser Video 2020/2021 – YouTube
Website: https://beachrmc.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/csulb.rmc/
