PATNA: Nasa and Patna? The two seem to be as far apart as Scylla and Charybdis, and yet, a preliminary design from Patna has been selected for the Nasa’s International Lunabotics Mining Competition, 2011, sent by a team of eight students from BIT Mesra (Patna campus).
Interestingly, Nasa’s technical team has selected their design. The team will participate in the final round of the competition to be held from May 23-28 at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, US.
Nasa has challenged the US and international undergraduate and graduate student teams to design and build a remote-controlled or autonomous excavator that could be used on the moon. The condition was that the lunar rover-cum-excavator must be able to collect and deposit a minimum of 10 kg (22 pounds) of lunar simulant in 15 minutes. Nasa is all set for its grand return to the “Moon Mission”.
The BIT Patna team named “Gurutva”, successfully conceptualized the preliminary design and the project was sent for Nasa’s approval.
The design team is led by Peetak Mitra, a second-year student of civil engineering. He is also the soil and stimulant analyst of the team. The other team members are Anurag Reddy, Rajat Tyagi, Subhomoy Ghosh, Aroop K Sen, Saurav Muraka, Viswa Teja, Shreyak Tiwari and Anmol Sharma. The team also includes a faculty advisor, Prof M A Hassan, from the mechanical engineering department.
“The robot designed by us can be used for excavation of the lunar soil or regolith and has an operational cycle of one hour of which, 45 minutes are spent on excavation and the rest 15 minutes it recharges its batteries from its solar panels. In a cycle at 30% efficiency, it can excavate about 18-20 kg of lunar regolith,” said Mitra.
“The Gurutva’ team has also forwarded the proposal to Isro and is being reviewed by Dr Madhavan Nair,” said another team member Ghosh.
Nasa, too, will directly benefit from the competition by encouraging the development of innovative lunar excavation concepts from universities which may result in clever ideas and solutions which could be applied to an actual lunar excavation device or payload, said a BIT Mesra teacher.
“In fact, the winning design will be incorporated into Nasa’s scheme of things while planning its MoonMission 2020′,” said Hasan.
The “Gurutva” team will now organize seminars across the state so that more and more students can get a glimpse of what it is doing. The team members will also exhibit their works in various science fairs and technical fests all over the country so that they can have a larger outreach.
One of the major objective of this lunabotics competition is to engage and retain students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and encourage them to innovate.