NASA has narrowed the field to six in its lunar soil excavating contest, and a team of students from South Dakota State University is among the group left in the hunt for a $1 million top prize.
Conceived in 2020, the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge tasked innovators with creating robotic systems that can navigate the rugged terrain of the Lunar South Pole, dig up its icy soil and transport it to another location, where, in theory, water could be extracted from the soil.
There were two earlier design and prototype phases in which SDSU advanced. In the latest stage, SDSU was one of 15 finalists invited to give their prototypes a 15-day test.
Nine entities completed the 15-day durability testing, attempting to have their equipment excavate up to 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds) of soil daily for 15 consecutive days and then document their work by video and lengthy reports, which were due Oct. 27. When NASA announced the six finalists, only one other was strictly composed of college students.
NASA awarded the top three places and added three runners-up. SDSU, which competes under the team name Space Trajectory, and Michigan Tech, which competes as MTU Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab, were both runners-up.
Corporate entities take top prizes
Going to work with the $300,000 first prize from the last phase is Starpath Robotics, San Francisco, with Terra Engineering, Gardena, California, grabbing the $200,000 second prize. Third place, which carries a $125,000 award, went to The Ice Diggers, Golden, Colorado.
Starpath has four full-time employees and a handful of technical engineering interns and contractors and was formed in mid-2022 to manufacture spacecraft propellant. Terra is a robotics firm that has been in business since 2010. The Ice Diggers is a cooperative effort between Colorado School of Mines and Lunar Outposts, a commercial space robotics firm founded in 2017 through a venture capital effort.
The other runner-up was Cislune Excavators, Los Angles, a firm that specializes in producing and supplying lunar-derived propellants.
All runners-up, including SDSU, received a $75,000 award.
Source: sdstate.edu
Photo Credit: south-dakota-state-university
Categories: South Dakota, Education