EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES

PROJECTS & COMPETITIONS

NASA-funded CAM-STAR aims to increase the awareness and broaden participation in space technology and applied research. To achieve this CAM-STAR encourages the UDC students to participate in projects and competition focuses on space technology.

3D Printed face shields

Jaime Rios, Takele Gemeda, and Demisse Wondwosen have participated in UDC COVID-19 Face Shield Cover project to provide Additively Manufactured PPE device to UDC and District of Columbia first responders.

Click link to watch video.

UDC Firebird Rover Team for NASA Human Rover Challenge

Each year, NASA organizes the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge that features an engineering design challenge to engage 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.

NASA’s Great Moonbuggy Race engaged more than 10,000 students and demonstrated that these budding scientists and engineers were capable of complex work. The NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge continues that tradition by providing an authentic engineering experience. Student teams design, build and test technologies that enable rovers to perform in a variety of environments. The Rover Challenge inspires participants to become the engineers to design NASA’s next-generation space systems. This challenge brings the competitors from top U.S. institutions and teams from various continents.

UDC Firebird Rover team has participated in NASA Human Rover Challenge and was selected as one of the top teams for the Drivetrain Technology Challenge by NASA Human Rover Challenge 2020. Due to COVID-19, NASA Human Rover Challenge 2020 cancelled in-person competition and decided to move to virtual competition instead, and Drivetrain challenge is the main competition this year.

Our team leader this year: Giancarlo D’Orazio and Voss Harrigan gave a presentation to audience from NASA.

Click on the link to see more pictures.

NASA Robotic Mining Competition (RMC): Lunabotics

UDC Teams was awarded $5000 team stipend & 1000 faculty stipend for 2022 competition

• Lunabotics is an Artemis Student Challenge hosted by NASA at the Kennedy Space Center and used to educate university students in systems engineering.
• Students are tasked with designing and building a robot capable of mining soil on the lunar surface.
• This competition benefits NASA and the participants directly. It provides an authentic engineering experience for students and ideas for NASA. Essentially while learning you are contributing to future space missions.

NASA CHALLENGES AND COMPETITIONS

NASA RASC-AL Competition

The NASA’s Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition, is an annual university-level engineering design challenge that allows students to work on real challenges and provide innovative solutions that can be used to advance human exploration of space. Competition themes range from designing systems and architectures for exploring the Moon and Mars to envisioning how astronauts will best take advantage of existing and future assets as explorers venture far from our home planet.

For RASC-AL competition, undergraduate and graduate teams developed new concepts that leveraged innovations for NASA’s Artemis program. NASA will send the first woman and next man to the Moon, enable sustainable lunar operations, and provide the foundation for humanity’s next giant leap, sending astronauts to Mars. This year’s competition moved beyond science and engineering to economics, with a theme dedicated to the analysis of future business opportunities that take advantage of space –extending to just beyond the Moon’s orbit–to improve the human condition.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-seeks-business-majors-engineers-for-2023-rasc-al-competition

NASA MINDS Undergraduate Student Design

NASA Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Innovative New Designs for Space (NASA MINDS) is a multi-semester undergraduate level activity that supports our Artemis mission and the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD) and Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD).   Students’ skills, creativity and innovation are challenged as they are asked to design and build technologies needed for NASA’s Artemis mission, with the support of their faculty.  All Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) are eligible to have a faculty-led student team.  Student teams will submit a proposal with a design concept meeting all baseline requirements.  Teams selected by NASA will receive $1,500 to be used in the build of their design.  Teams must have a faculty mentor, and the faculty will receive a $1,000 stipend upon successful completion of all requirements.  Selected team projects will be reviewed by NASA judges; teams can receive recognition awards up to $5,000.

NASA MINDS is a hands-on design and build collegiate learning experience.  The most unique feature of NASA MINDS is found in its broad-based approach.  While competitions focus on a specific technology all teams must work on, teams in NASA MINDS will independently select a technology that is relevant to NASA’s Artemis mission.  This will allow students to focus on technologies which interest and inspire them the most. The only constraint is that the technology and the goals of the team’s project must support a need for the technologies required for Artemis.

https://www.nasa.gov/stem/murep/projects/nasa-minds.html

NASA international space APPS challenge

The NASA International Space Apps Challenge (Space Apps) is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space.

Each October, over the course of two days, Space Apps brings participants from around the world together at hundreds of in-person and virtual local events to solve challenges submitted by NASA experts. After the hackathon, project submissions are judged by space agency experts and winners are selected for one of 10 Global Awards.

Space Apps provides problem-solvers worldwide with NASA’s free and open data, giving teams the opportunity to learn how to use these resources to solve each year’s challenges.

Space Apps also inspires collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. Our mission is to leverage this interest to encourage the growth and diversity of the next generation of scientists, technologists, designers, storytellers, and engineers.

https://www.spaceappschallenge.org/