Vile Parle college group wins Nasa award second year in row
Srinivas Laxman,TNN | Apr 29, 2014
MUMBAI: They are truly star struck. Six students and a professor of Vile Parle’s Mukesh Patel School Of Technology, Management and Engineering, for the second year in succession, have won a Nasa competition.
Last year, the group won Nasa’s telemetry award at The Great Moonbuggy Race held at the Nasa Marshall Space Flight Centre, Huntsville, Alabama in the US. This year, they walked away with the system safety and engineering award at Nasa’s first Human Explorer Rover Challenge held at the same venue between April 10 and 12. The team leader is Aseem Prakash.
An announcement by the Marshall Space Flight Centre said the team won the award for “exemplifying best safety practices”. The event involved a team—comprising a boy and a girl—cycling the rover along a 1.12km track. Karan Shah cycled the rover while Rushali Jaiswal sat pillion to complete the track in seven minutes.
Vivek Maurya, a team member, said their 36-kg rover is made of aluminium and steel and is 5 ft in length and width. “A larger version of this rover can be used by astronauts to move moving around on another planet,” he said.
The rover took shape at a bicycle shop at Carter Road in Bandra. “We started in February first week and completed it on March 22,” Maurya said, while pointing out that the total project cost was Rs 2 lakh.
He said that the project report submission deadline was 3.30am (IST), March 29. “We transmitted it at 3.20am. (IST), 10 minutes before the deadline and got a confirmation six minutes later at 3.26am (IST).”
While flying to Huntsville, the rover was dismantled and packed in three boxes. “But at New York’s JFK airport, we were shocked to discover that one of the boxes had been misplaced,” he said.
“The misplaced box was retrieved and reached the team at Huntsville late on the April 11 night. It was put on the last flight from JFK to Huntsville. The main competition was on April 12, the 53rd anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s flight,” he said. But in case the box would not have been found, the team had a Plan-B—there was a backup arrangement to make another rover.