KMC students earn ticket to NASA event

The Robo Physicists Society of Kirori Mal College - a team of undergraduate students selected to work in international projects – is reaching for the stars quite literally. Two groups of students are all set to participate in a prestigious international space project each, one of them belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

These students have designed a robot which can negotiate the tough terrain of Mars and a paper on optimising the habitat conditions of astronauts in spacecrafts to enable longer duration missions. Both the proposals have been shortlisted among scores of entries received from the world over and will now compete with some others prepared by the best engineering varsities. Both the teams are extremely excited and ready to fly to US soon.

The KMC Robo Physicists Society is known to actively partake in such exciting global space exercises. Only last year, they went for the NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition which took place in the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and came back home with two awards in different segments. The University Rover Challenge organised by the Mars Society of US, for which the young scientists are going later this month, and NASA’s RASC-AL (Revolutionary Aerospace Systems and Academic Linkage) scheduled in June, are, however, new to them. Six students of all three years in BSc Physics at KMC are going for the former event while only two students of the second year – both girls – are going for the latter.

A thrilled Diksha Malik, part of the University Rover Challenge, informs us, “The Mars Society in US, a group of retired scientists and engineers from NASA, has created an artificial Martian terrain in the desert state of Utah. It is marked by loose soil, rocks, clefts and valleys. Now the challenge is to build a robot which not just manoeuvres this very difficult landscape but also performs functions like picking up soil samples, testing them on the spot, sending reports and servicing equipment. Also, the robot has to be wirelessly controlled as it will go out of sight in real time situation.”

NASA’s RASC-AL competition, on the other hand, requires students to prepare a detailed report on how the habitat conditions in a spacecraft can be further enhanced to enable astronauts to stay on longer. Aishwarya Girdhar, a second year student participating, points out, “We have to dock an asteroid too which means attaching our spacecraft to an asteroid. Also, till now, most space missions have been in lower orbit which is within 160 kilometres of the earth. Our design will help astronauts explore the universe beyond.” The KMC society is participating in this particular competition in collaboration with the University of North Florida (UNF). So two students of DU and UNF each will present their joint paper.  

What the budding astronauts from KMC agree on is that “these have been very challenging endeavours.” “We are only BSc Physics students with little knowledge of robotics and engineering and we have to compete with people majoring in astrophysics,” says Diksha. Aishwarya concurs, “We applied everything that we learnt in the classrooms. I hope our efforts are recognised and bring us the right result.”