Indian Students Build Vehicle to Navigate Celestial Bodies for NASA’s Rover Challenge

A group of students from Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, NMIMS, in Mumbai have not only successfully completed the prestigious human exploration rover challenge set by America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but they have also already filed a patent for their design!

The human exploration rover challenge found 99 teams from educational institutes from across the world (there were some teams from India as well), design a rover that can easily navigate through objects in the Solar System.

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The team of six, dubbed Team Technovators, designed the human-powered rover that can retrieve samples and navigate through tough landscapes and environs.

Image for representation. Photo source: Wikimedia 

Tirth Shah, the student who led the team spoke to the Times of India, noting, “We had designed, fabricated and tested the rover which is capable of operating at the harsh terrains of various celestial bodies of the solar system. The challenge included designing, constructing and testing technologies for mobility devices to perform in environments of different celestial bodies of the solar system. It also included developing an advanced telemetry system along with features for astronaut safety.”

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According to NASA’s official website, other student teams from India included teams from Skyline Institute of Engineering & Technology, Greater Noida,  Hindustan University, Chennai, India and Lovely Professional University, Phagwara. The latter two institutes participated as rookie teams.

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Team Technovators’s design was tested at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, USA. The team used extremely unique forms of technology in order to develop their rover that includes a technique called additive printing, which they used to create the wheels of their rover. One of the reasons they have filed for a patent for their design is because of such unique techniques that they employed.

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