Hundreds of college students and their advisors soon will arrive at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida for the sixth annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition (RMC), May 18-22. Forty-seven teams from 28 states, including Alaska and Hawaii, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, will maneuver their uniquely designed robotic miners in a pit filled with regolith simulant, also called BP-1.
The students’ robot designs and mining demonstrations in a pit of BP-1 could benefit NASA’s mission of pioneering a human presence on Mars through resource mining and utilization. Their concepts could one day be applied to actual excavation devices which may have the potential to significantly contribute to advances in Martian mining and NASA’s space exploration missions.
“The competition encourages and challenges college-level students to think beyond Earth. Not only do they get to design and build a robot that is capable of traversing and mining Martian or chaotic terrains, they also contribute to NASA’s In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) mission, to harness the resources on-site that will allow future explorers to live off the land,” said Rich Johanboeke, RMC project manager.
The four-pronged competition requires each team to build a robotic miner, operate it in the regolith pit, and collect and deposit as much simulant as possible during two 10-minute runs.
For this year’s competition, small limestone rocks no larger than 2 centimeters will be randomly mixed into the BP-1 to simulate ice. These “ice” rocks were quarried in south Florida and shipped to Kennedy.
The other parts of the competition include writing and presenting a systems engineering paper based on NASA’s approach to systems engineering, and completing outreach projects for K-12 schools in their districts.
The team that scores the most points in the competition receives the top award, the Joe Kosmo Award for Excellence.
The RMC is coordinated by Kennedy’s Education Office for NASA.
For more information about the RMC competition, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nasarmc.
For more information on the teams, visit https://www.facebook.com/RoboticMiningCompetition.