May - 2011 issue > In Focus

By SI Team

Six teams from different engineering colleges of India were awarded in a competition organized by international space agency NASA, for designing a lunar vehicle for future expeditions to the moon. The Great Moonbuggy Race competition challenges the students to tackle several engineering problems dealt with by Apollo-era lunar rover developers at the Marshall Center in the late 1960s. Students from high school and college were asked to design, build and race lightweight, human-powered rovers called “moonbuggies”. This year a total of 84 teams of future engineers, including the six teams from India, demonstrated their talent at the event.

Each Moonbuggy was to be human powered and carry two students, one female and one male, over a half-mile simulated lunar terrain course including craters, rocks, lava ridges, inclines and lunar soil. The engineering colleges Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, Punjab Engineering College University of Technology (two teams), Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology, Jaipur National University shared with a team from Moscow Aviation University, the award for best performance by an international team, in the event organized at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Among the participating teams were the U.S. high school, college and university students from 22 states and Puerto Rico; and international challengers from six countries, including returning teams from Canada, India and Germany and - for the first time - racers from Ethiopia, Pakistan and Russia.

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