Budding talent’s take on lunar exploration

This is the second year that UKSEDS, has organized and run the Lunar Rover Competition in Harwell (UK). GMV could hardly miss out on an initiative of this type, not only supporting it as a partner but also forming part of the jury made up by industry experts.

The competition, for which university undergraduates from the whole country are eligible, sets the challenge of designing, building and testing a lunar rover (based on a potential future robotic mission to a crater on the lunar South Pole).

The challenge began 9 months back with the design, construction and fine-tuning of the rover, culminating on 30 June when the teams from universities like Bath and Edinburgh demonstrated all the work put in over these months. The students ran their rovers past a review panel of industry experts and the rover was then put through its paces in a moon-like terrain on RAL Space’s site.

Mobility over a lunar analog surface and sample collection are two of the challenges that the competitors had to meet. This competition represents a great chance for students to practice in a career environment and see how things work in the space industry.

The winning team from the 7 entrants came from London’s Imperial College, which also won the prize for the best Critical Design Review. The team from Sheffield University, for its part, won the best innovation prize for its advanced scoop mechanism to retrieve lunar samples, while the Manchester University team was rewarded for its rover-related outreach program to encourage more young people to study science subjects at school.

UKSEDS (UK Students for the Exploration and Development of Space) UK's national student space society, sets out to help and educate youngsters and inspire them towards space exploration and research. To do so the society organizes and runs a whole host of activities. UKSEDS is the UK chapter of the global SEDS movement, working alongside sister organizations all around the world in Canada, Mexico, Nepal, Spain and the United States, among others.

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