Eight engineering students from Laurentian University are over the moon after winning an international NASA design competition, beating 40 other universities from around the world.
The team, made up of fourth-year students in mechanical engineering, designed and built a “lunabot” – a remote-controlled machine able to excavate lunar materials – which dug and deposited a world record 237.4 kilograms of synthetic moon materials in 15 minutes.
The students’ victory is a special coup as they are part of the first graduating class of Laurentian’s new mechanical engineering program, which has its convocation Thursday.
The second annual NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition was held over six days at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, and attracted qualifying teams from the United States, India, Colombia and China. McGill University was the only other Canadian school competing.
“I think this is probably the premier event for engineering students,” said Markus Timusk, an assistant professor and the team’s faculty adviser, en route home from Florida.
The University of North Dakota excavated 172.2 kilograms of “lunar simulant” to place second, ahead of third-place University of West Virginia at 106.4 kilograms.
Laurentian’s team began work on their lunabot in September with a budget of less than $10,000, a modest amount compared with many other competitors. But still their margin of victory might have been wider: despite three days of testing, the device stopped working for two of the competition’s 15 minutes due to a communication issue.
“Those were the longest two minutes of my life,” Dr. Timusk said.
