The Mars Society's University Rover Challenge Documentary

Each year, student engineering teams from around the world immerse themselves in designing, building, and testing the next generation of Mars Rovers. University students from different engineering disciplines (mechanical, electrical, software) and science backgrounds, spend 12 months of the year preparing for the annual University Rover Challenge competition at the Mars Desert Research Station in Hanksville, Utah United States. In this grueling Mars-like environment, they test their student-built rover and themselves in a series of events such as traversing, remote scientific analysis, and retrieval and manipulation. Now in its 10th year, this challenging event has proved to be extremely rewarding for the students as individuals, but also benefits the entire field of space exploration by stimulating technical innovation and inspiring the next generation of talent who will take us forward.

You can check out the following documentary video which was produced by Protocase https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CWQlNNEotA , as a way to raise awareness of this entry point for space exploration, for students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) education, and to showcase the experience these university students receive, as they create technology that may one day work alongside human explorers in the field.

The video was premiered at the 19th Annual Mars Society Convention back in September. This four-day event brought together leading scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and government officials to address the significance of the latest in scientific discoveries and technological advances. Key discussions for the event included “how close are humans to stepping on Mars, and what technological advances are needed to make this happen?” Along with presentations from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, The Mars Society’s Robert Zubrin also addressed the audience to close the convention. This setting was a perfect fit to showcase the documentary as these students involved in the video will aspire to be interns and full-time employees at most of the space organizations in attendance watching. All in all, it was a great two weeks for space as Elon Musk also announced his Mar’s colonization plans the following week.

For an audience who really appreciates advances in technology, what technology do you feel the students could be adapting that may help design a more functional Mars Rover? Any ideas will gladly be presented to the URC team and communicated to all teams for next year's event.

For more information on the University Rover Challenge event, have a look at urc.marssociety.org or check out more URC Mars Rovers videos at: http://ift.tt/2dh8zkM

Thanks to everyone who continues to support the vision of STEM education and Space Exploration.

Submitted October 20, 2016 at 09:57PM by cmcgean45 http://ift.tt/2emT2TN via TikTokTikk