10 Odisha School Students Selected For NASA Rover Challenge 2021

Bhubaneswar: For the first time, a 10-member school team from Odisha has been selected to participate in the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge 2021.

According to Anil Pradhan, founder of the Bhubaneswar-based Navonmesh Prasar Foundation, the Navonmesh Prasar Student Astronomy Team (NaPSAT) has formed a contingent of 10 meritorious school students including the ITI of Odisha who will participate in the NASA Rover Challenge scheduled to be held in April.

The team will prepare a rover that can move on the surface of Mars, Pradhan added.

The NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge features an engineering design challenge every year to engage the students worldwide in the next phase of human space exploration. The annual event is a more complex follow-up to the successful NASA’s Great Moonbuggy Race. The competition challenges high school and college students to create a vehicle designed to traverse the simulated surface of another world.

During its 20-year journey, NASA’s Great Moonbuggy Race has engaged more than 10,000 students and demonstrated that these budding scientists and engineers were capable of complex work for which the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge provides an authentic engineering experience. The student teams design, build and test technologies that enable the rovers to perform in a variety of environments. This unique event inspires the participants to become engineers to design NASA’s next-generation space systems.