NASA invites five Mumbai kids

Updated on: Saturday, May 14, 2011

It’s barely three months since a ‘lunabot’ was born at a Goregaon lab. Today, it is an expert at extracting oxygen from sand particles found on the lunar surface.

The indigenously-built robot will now fly to the US with its creators, a team of five Indian students, to participate in NASA’s second annual lunabotics competition. The competition will be held at Kennedy Space Center in Florida from May 23 to 28.

The team of six consists of Ronak Gandhi (20), Chirag Chauhan (20), Viditi Parikh (19), Vaibhav Gandhi (19) and Suparna Rao (19) from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS) along with team leader Ravi Teja Nallapu (23) of the University of Houston. The challenge for the students was to design and build a remote-controlled or autonomous excavator, called a lunabot, which could collect and deposit a minimum of 10 kg of lunar simulant within 15 minutes.

The complexities of the challenge include the abrasive characteristics of the lunar simulant, the weight and size limitations of the lunabot, and the ability to control the lunabot from a remote control centre. “The lunabot functions in a synchronised manner. The functioning can be divided in three parts. The main part is a jaw/ hand-like structure which collects the lunar sand (regolith) and there are two side collectors on both sides of the main body which continuously collect the sand without a break. Hence this is the first of its kind mechanism where three mechanisms are functional at the same,” said Ronak.

Chirag was in charge of the robot’s design. “The initial design was made in CAD software. It was then sent to Houston for further approval. When we got the green signal, we started manually building the lunabot,” said Chauhan.

Viditi, in-charge of the encoding section, said, “ThinkLABS Technosolutions has helped us with the coding and networking.” The team has been shortlisted among 50 teams across the globe. “We had to submit research papers, system engineering papers, social outreach project papers and many more documents before getting shortlisted,” said Vaibhav Gandhi.

The winner of this competition will get $5000 and six-week internship with NASA. The winners will also get a chance to witness one of the space launches at NASA.

NASA invites five Mumbai kids

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