Michigan Tech Students Develop Lunar Rover for NASA’s Artemis Program

MTU is one of the universities that received a grant under NASA’s BIG Idea Challenge.

The MTU team developed their own lunar testing facility for the T-REX due to lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo courtesy of Michigan Tech University.)

The MTU team developed their own lunar testing facility for the T-REX due to lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo courtesy of Michigan Tech University.)

Students from Michigan Technological University (MTU) have developed a rover that is designed to provide light and power to NASA’s lunar explorers. Dubbed “Tethered permanently shadowed Region EXplorer” or T-REX, it carries a superconducting cable that transmits power while it also serves as a wireless communication hub on the dark side of the moon. This won the team the Artemis Award last February 2020 under NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative, and Game-changing (BIG) Idea Challenge where they received a grant of $162,637.

According to MTU, T-REX was specifically designed to be a “recharging station and comms tower in a small, portable package.” The permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) of the moon are reported to host harsh environmental conditions, making space exploration challenging and dangerous. NASA’s goal for the 2020 BIG Idea Challenge was to encourage the innovation of technologies that could allow for better study of the moon’s history and composition. This is in line with the agency’s Artemis program, which plans on putting the first woman and the next man back on the lunar surface.

However, participants immediately hit a roadblock following the COVID-19 pandemic which caused the shutdown of laboratory facilities and universities that were necessary for building and testing the prototypes.

According to NASA, the designs of the entries were required to have realistic parameters and payloads based on the existing payload capacities of commercial space firms, as well as in alignment with the Artemis program’s exploration objectives. To successfully meet these, the MTU team created their own test facilities from scratch, which allowed them to build and develop the T-REX prototype remotely—this meant designing a replica of the lunar surface in tandem with the project to test T-REX’s capabilities and collect data. According to MTU, a senior design team drafted the initial rover design while the rest of the members worked on developing testing environments and refining iterations as tests were conducted.

The MTU team developed their own lunar testing facility for the T-REX due to lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo courtesy of Michigan Tech University.)

The MTU team developed their own lunar testing facility for the T-REX due to lockdown restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo courtesy of Michigan Tech University.)

Other universities in the BIG Idea Challenge shared that virtual meetings and makeshift workstations from home quickly became the norm as they raced to present the prototypes and submit their studies by November of last year. Marcello Guagdagno, the student lead for MTU’s T-REX, jokingly shared how besides hard work, sugar and creativity helped spur the team on through the unique setup.

“When we think about tenacity, one of our University’s core values, it was important to keep everyone healthy and still move forward with the project,” adds Paul Van Susante, the T-REX team’s faculty adviser and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MTU. “The pandemic required us to adapt and overcome, and the team rose magnificently to that challenge.”

In spite of the conditions, undergraduate students who were able to partake in the competition have expressed interest in pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees in the STEM fields in the future.

“These university teams have demonstrated perseverance this summer as they continued to develop innovative prototypes of systems for power, exploration communication, and more,” says Drew Hope, manager of NASA’s Game Changing Development program. “These systems could enhance NASA’s ability to explore more of the Moon. I’m always impressed with the variety of ideas and problem solving we get from the BIG Idea teams, and I’m looking forward to seeing their final products.”

For more information, visit http://bigidea.nianet.org/competition-basics/2020-forum-results/.

For more news and stories, check out the hardware NASA is using to put astronauts back on the moon here.