Note: This is the second installment in a four-part series. To read the previous installment, click here.
Of the nearly 90 high school, college and university teams registered to compete in the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge April 11-12, only about one in five are completely new to NASA-sponsored student racing in North Alabama.
That’s because the rest have competed at least once or twice in the Rover Challenge’s forerunner, the NASA Great Moonbuggy Race, held each spring in Huntsville, Ala., from 1994-2013. Those veterans, whether they took home trophies or not, possess hard-won insight about the challenges of the course, and know the tricks to designing a durable (i.e., smash-proof) rover frame.
Regardless, said NASA scientist Dennis Gallagher, “this year, everybody’s a rookie.”
Gallagher is a space physicist and supervisor in the Science & Exploration Research Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, which organizes both student engineering challenges for the agency. He’s also one of the principal planners of the event. Come race weekend, he’ll be a course fixture, overseeing elements of the competition, ensuring the pit crews are equipped to help students make last-minute vehicle tweaks and repairs, and guiding team after trophy-seeking team to the starting line.
What makes this year’s crop of racers all rookies? It’s not just the semantic and practical transition from “moonbuggies” to “rovers” or the updated obstacle course designed to make even the savviest of past racers sweat. It’s the central design challenge of the 2014 event, Gallagher said — it’s the wheels.
For 20 years, the Great Moonbuggy Race challenged students to conceive and build their own lightweight roving vehicles, powered by one male and one female driver. Those basic rules still apply — but student teams now must toss out the bicycle, motocross and off-road tires they’ve typically used in the past to speed over the alien terrain of the course (a path slightly more than half a mile in length, winding around the hilly exterior of Huntsville’s U.S. Space & Rocket Center).
The wheels — the core element of the vehicle — now must be each team’s own invention, along with the rest of their rover. “Tracks, treads, skids, belts, rails, rollers,” Gallagher suggests. “Whatever mobility components they devise to provide surface contact and motion across the course are fair game — with one exception. They can no longer incorporate inflated (or uninflated) pneumatic tires.”
That should make for a truly inventive fleet of student-built rovers, said Dr. Frank Six, the Marshall academic affairs officer who helped create both events and co-designed both race courses.
“Our racers are overcoming the same types of design problems NASA engineers grapple with on real vehicle development and exploration missions every day,” Six said. “Where they’re going is instrumental to the solutions they’ll come up with.”
This year, with the Red Planet as the primary inspiration for the unique obstacles littering the course, teams must factor in ideal wheel diameter and traction to successfully navigate over a variety of surfaces — from large boulders, small pebbles and loose sand, to smooth surfaces, cracks, crevasses and erosion ruts.
Marshall education specialist Diedra Williams, who leads planning for the event, said team reactions to the new wheel requirement have run the gamut from excitement to mild panic, but she’s quick to reassure worried teams they do have the right stuff to execute a winning rover design.
“It’s a more complex challenge, but it’s also a more authentic engineering experience than we’ve ever tasked them with before,” she said. “Now they’re real engineers!”
Tom Hancock, a member of the Rover Challenge planning committee and past chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Greater Huntsville section, agreed. “These teams have an exciting proposition before them — a real product to be developed and tested,” he said. “This raises the level of sophistication of the event to a whole new plateau. It was about pure, gut survival out there on the course before, building a vehicle around a proven mobility device: an off-the-shelf set of wheels. Now it’s a matter of refined technology performance and a heightened level of team ingenuity.”
The organizers assure racers struggling with this year’s challenge they’ll get to tackle the course even if they show up without a working solution to this year’s central challenge. They won’t qualify for a top trophy, of course — but no one will rebuke them for a design failure.
“Failure is part of the engineering process,” Hancock said. “Teams will still get to try out the new course, network with teams from around the world and better prepare themselves for next year.”
“Do the best you can,” Gallagher echoed. “Accept that something might not work, and keep trying to improve. The only failure is not to try again.”
Next time: We’ll showcase the awards student are vying for in this year’s competition.