MIT Team Wins NASA/FSRI Exploration-Focused University Design Competition

A team of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, competing under the NASA/Florida In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) university design competition, submitted the winning design for an instrument that would excavate and process lunar regolith to detect the presence of water ice and demonstrate the feasibility of producing oxygen on the Moon. The MIT team beat out other ISRU finalists from the Colorado School of Mines, Florida Institute of Technology, and Purdue University.

“I’d like to congratulate the MIT team for an excellent design that combined the talents of students from engineering, physics, chemistry and other disciplines,” said Dr. Sam Durrance, a former astronaut and executive director of the Florida Space Research Institute (FSRI). “I know these students will go on to become leading engineers and scientists, hopefully in support of the Vision for Space Exploration.”

The ISRU teams were asked to design their experiments within a list of constraints based on NASA plans for a future robotic mission to a permanently shaded crater on the Moon’s southern pole. The constraints included mass and power limitations, such as a 100 watt power budget. Each of the finalists won $12,000 from NASA and FSRI to develop their designs, as well as a trip to the recent 1st Space Exploration Conference in Orlando, provided by Lockheed Martin Corp. The winning team won an additional $1,000 from FSRI.

The competition was part of NASA’s Regolith and Environment Science & Oxygen and Lunar Volatile Extraction (RESOLVE) project, managed jointly by Johnson Space Center in Texas and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. FSRI administered the national competition with co-sponsorship by the Florida Space Grant Consortium (FSGC).

FSRI is an institute established by the state’s Governor and Legislature to stimulate Florida’s space industry diversification through academic support to space research and technology programs. FSGC, hosted at the University of Central Florida, is part of a nationwide NASA-sponsored network of 52 academic consortia responsible for supporting space research and education projects.