Students From TN and Punjab Win Awards at NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge

Student groups from India's Tamil Nadu and Punjab have won awards at the 28th annual Human Exploration Rover Challenge conducted by NASA recently, the agency announced in its virtual awards ceremony on 29 April.

While students from Decent Children Model Presidency School, Punjab won STEM Engagement Award under the high school division, team from Tamil Nadu's Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Vellore, won Social Media Award under college/university division.

In all, awards were presented in nine categories.

The challenge involved 91 teams, who belonged to 58 colleges and 33 high schools from across the world and the US.

The students spent the last eight months designing, building, and testing their rovers for the challenge – one of the original seven NASA Artemis Student Challenges, said NASA in a press release.

What Was the Challenge?

For the challenge, the teams had to design, engineer, and test a human-powered rover on a course simulating terrain found on rocky bodies in the solar system. Teams also performed mission assignments while negotiating the course, including sample retrievals and spectrographic analysis.

“This year, students were asked to design a course that would mimic obstacles as if they were competing in Huntsville,” said Aundra Brooks-Davenport, activity lead for the challenge at Marshall.

“Ensuring team safety was a major factor in developing the design of their own obstacles,” he added.

The 2022 challenge was conducted virtually instead of being held at the US Space & Rocket Center near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

"For more than 25 years, the annual NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge and its sponsors have encouraged student teams from the United States and around the world to push the limits of innovation and imagine what it will take to explore the Moon, Mars, and other worlds," NASA said in a statement.

The challenge is managed by the Office of STEM Engagement at Marshall. The competition reflects the goals of the Artemis program, which includes putting the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, the statement noted.

It added that NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement uses challenges and competitions to further the agency’s goal of encouraging students to pursue degrees and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.