SWOSU engineering students to tackle Mars sand in NASA challenge
A team of Southwestern Oklahoma State University students will attempt to navigate a rover through dust-like Mars sand this weekend. Fortunately, the venture won’t take them to Mars, but to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., to demonstrate their technology.
For the fourth consecutive year, the SWOSU Department of Engineering Technology is participating in the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge: Technology Challenge Award.
“Each year NASA has certain rules and restrictions that the students must follow,” said Cindi Albrightson, instructor in the SWOSU Department of Engineering Technology and team sponsor. “This year, the students must make a rover for the surface of Mars, which has sand like flour.”
To solve this problem, the SWOSU team is using a new approach, said Tiler Rose, one of the student engineers.
“For the past three years, we have constructed our vehicle to look pretty similar to the lunar rover you may have seen pictures of from the ’60s. That has served us extremely well, but we decided to try something new this year,” Rose said. “Since we are timed going over the obstacles on the course, we decided to experiment this year with a vehicle that is constructed more like a tandem bicycle, where the riders sit one in front of the other, rather than side-by-side, like the actual lunar rover.”
The machine
was entirely designed and engineered by students.
“Something I think is pretty cool about our rover is that, at least 90 percent has been made by our team in the lab. Also we have one of our wheels autographed by Thomas P. Stafford,” team member Hugo Chaparro said.
The team consists of 12 students from various parts of Oklahoma including Chandler Roof, Tiler Rose, Nick Rymer, Joseph Rymer, Jay Penner, Caleb Wichert, Alex Scarborough, Jacob Wall, Hugo Chaparro, Bryson Ridley, Tucker Sawatzky and Andrew Harrison.
In addition to the engineering and construction of the rover, the team also has to solve other issues such as how to deal with extraterrestrial surfaces — for future engineers more a challenge than a problem.
“Part of the difficulty of the competition has been the introduction of new types of obstacles on the course,” Rose said. “In recent years, simulated Martian surfaces have been added as well.”
The change was made with the future in mind.
“NASA is preparing for the Space Launch System missions that will hopefully be taking us to Mars in the 2030s,” Rose said. “If you look at pictures of Mars, you’ll see terrain almost as varied as what you’d find on Earth. This has made the design of the wheels especially difficult.”
While the students have a clear task at hand, the rover program fulfills a much broader function. It builds confidence in skills learned in the classroom and builds teams.
“During the course of the year I have learned how to put everything that I have learned throughout my three years in SWOSU into play. I have become very efficient at using the CNC machines. This is just like having a real fun job,” Chaparro said.
“In fact most of my spare time when I’m not in class I am trying to solve the technical we experienced from the night before,” he added. “This experience has also taught me that anything can be done, one way or another, with a group of people that is just as enthusiastic as I am about this project.”
The students hope that one day they will contribute a breakthrough technology for space exploration. After all, it wouldn’t be the first time SWOSU would produce a future NASA standout.
NASA engineer John Aaron, who developed the electrical recovery sequence for the Apollo 13 mission, is a SWOSU grad. And late last year, NASA astronaut and Weatherford native General Thomas P. Stafford received SWOSU’s first ever honorary doctorate.
SWOSU is also included in the Oklahoma Space Grant Consortium, which consists of a statewide partnership of eight universities, a cooperative extension service, state government, city government, industry and Stafford Air & Space Museum supporting programs in science, mathematics, engineering, technology, education, geography, and other space related disciplines.
For now, the students are focused on the competition.
“Our main goal is to have a perfectly functional rover that will make it through the course without having the rides get off the vehicle. Also to finish in the top 10,” Chaparro said.