PNW students won sixth and ninth place honors in a field of over 50 rovers in NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge 2019, held at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, April 12-13. The annual event features an engineering design challenge and promotes research and development of new technology for crewed space missions to other worlds.
The international competition included college teams from 20 U.S. States, Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, as well as Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Columbia, Brazil, Dominican Republic and India.
PNW entered two rovers in the competition. Rover #1 finished in sixth place and Rover #2 came in at ninth place. They were also two of only 24 rovers that accumulated points in an allotted time. The challenge required a student-constructed rover to traverse a 0.5 mile course with 14 Martian-type obstacles while performing a variety of five tasks, such as sampling rocks and planting a flag on a cratered surface.