UTA MAE Team Earns Third Place at UT Design Challenge
Team NaN represented the UT Arlington Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the NASA Texas Space Grant Consortium, Design Challenge, winning third place for Best Oral Presentation at the competition! Sponsored by NASA and administered by the NTSG Consortium, Design Challenge is a unique academic experience that allows student research teams to propose, design, and fabricate a solution toward solving NASA research objectives.
Team NaN includes Aerospace Engineering majors Joel John, Nicholas Quillin, and Ram Raythattha, and Mechanical Engineering major Syed Nashwan Chowdhury. Their faculty advisor on the project was Dr. Shuo Linda Wang, and they received mentorship from Chatwin Lansdowne, an Engineer from NASA Johnson Space Center. Their project, Platform for Lunar Follow-ME Camera Drone originates from the high cost and logistical difficulty of capturing astronaut footage on the moon. Since crewed missions are very expensive, and astronauts are focused on mission-critical objectives instead of operating a camera, the need for an autonomous solution is clear.
The central idea is to translate the familiar camera drone concept from Earth to the lunar environment. This concept immediately faces the technical challenge of mechanical mobility, and this must be solved to successfully implement the autonomous lunar drone. This design project studies the feasibility of different propellant setups to maintain continuous flight for twenty minutes. The current feasibility study focuses on cold gas and monopropellants as they are obtainable on the moon. Other types of propulsion such as solid rockets and nuclear-powered motors were considered, but ultimately disregarded due to a lack of resources, safety, or excessive weight. This year, 24 student research teams from across the state of Texas worked on NASA-topics ranging from lunar recycling and lunar habitat manufacturing to innovations to rovers and space suits for the future exploration of the Moon and Mars.
At the showcase event, the oral presentations were judged by TSGC and NASA mentors. Despite being the first team UTA sent in many years, and competing against senior design teams, Team NaN won 3rd place in the presentation category - a resounding success! Team NaN believes their design can be researched further to produce physical models for analysis. Congratulations to Dr. Linda Wang and the entire team for this remarkable achievement!
