Mining Engineers make it to finals of NASA's Mars Ice Challenge
Virginia Tech's Mars Ice Challenge team has been selected as one of 12 semi-finalists in the NASA 2021 Moon to Mars Ice & Prospecting Challenge.
NASA's engineering design and technology competition is open to undergraduate and graduate students from throughout the nation, and tasks teams with designing and building hardware that can assess subsurface density profiles and extract water from a simulated Martian surface.
The competition follows NASA's theory that beneath the Martian surface are potential reserves of water in the form of ice. Teams are tasked with developing a system that can first penetrate the surface layer, or overburden, then extract and transfer as much clean, liquid water as possible. Part of the challenge is developing creative solutions for melting the ice and filtering out debris and overburden from the water.
Virginia Tech’s team is comprised of undergraduate students from several engineering departments, including three juniors from mining and minerals engineering: Avery Rhem, Zhenghao Zhou, and Justin Hartman. Dr. Kevin Shinpaugh, collegiate professor in the Virginia Tech Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, serves as the team’s advisor. Dr. Erik Westman, mining and minerals engineering department professor, is a consultant for the mining students.
The first phase of the challenge took place over the fall 2020 semester, where teams researched and brainstormed potential design options. The process culmiated in the team's final design proposal for TAURUS, or Two-Probe Automated Regolith Upheaval System. Regolith refers to the fine dust or overburden material found on lunar and martian surfaces.
“Technically we are designing a drilling rig,” said Zhenghao Zhou, mining and minerals engineering junior. In the Virginia Tech design, an auger-like screw is contained within a sheath on a drilling rig. Once the screw breaks through the overburden, it can reach ice located beneath the surface.
“In this design, the screw sheath is heated,” explained Justin Hartman, also a junior in the department. “Once the screw gets through the overburden, the lower tip of the heated sheath will begin to melt the ice. The sheath is also connected to pumps that then draw the heated water.” According to Hartman, most teams use a design which melt the ice later. “In our design, we use some of the water heated by the sheath to further melt the ice below it."
As a semi-finalist, the Virginia Tech Mars Ice Challenge team will receive a $10,000 development stipend to build and test its design system before demonstrating its capabilities in the competition.
For the second phase of the competition, the team will submit a mid-project report and video to demonstrate their development and progress. Once the reports are judged, one more final round of team cuts will be made, and the resulting ten finalist teams will be invited to attend to the on-site event.
NASA plans to narrow the field with a mid-project evaluation in March 2021, after which the top 10 teams will be invited to the on-site live competition at NASA’s Langley Research Center, June 2 – 4, 2021.