This past June, Stevens students James Furrer, Arjun Krishna, Nicholas Sorrentino, Jonathan Bobkov, Ann Collins, and Dana Roe participated in NASA’s RASC-AL (Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage), a collegiate aerospace design competition. Held at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, this year’s theme was titled 2019 Special Edition: Moon to Mars Ice & Prospecting Challenge. Each team competed to develop technologies to mine for water on the Moon and Mars.
James Furrer, one of the teammates who graduated this past May, now works for New Era Converting Machinery as a controls engineer. Being one of the last to join the senior design team, his friend and fellow classmate (and now co-worker at New Era Converting Machinery) Jonathan Bobkov approached him about the project.
In order to come up with a solution to extract ice water from the moon and Mars, the team had to break down the problem into three main parts: 1) getting through the dirt and rock layers, 2) melting the ice, and 3) pumping the water out.
Requiring strategy, several design iterations, and testing, the team looked at past competitions to see what worked and what didn’t. Finally, they decided to design a robot, DEIMOS (Drill-based Extraction of Ice-water and Martian Overburden System), that would utilize a 1.5-inch diameter drill bit attached to a rotary hammer. This was the most effective way to get through harder materials such as cement and limestone; other teams that participated in the competition had used normal drills that were not able to penetrate through the hard layers of material.
Their strategy was to use the hammer drill to bore through the meters of material into the ice below. Once a borehole (a narrow shaft bored in the ground) to the ice was drilled out, a heated extraction tube (a heater cartridge in the tip of a copper pipe) with a pump was lowered into the borehole. This melted the ice into water, which could then be pumped out. They also allowed hot water to be pumped back into the borehole to further increase their melt rate. From there, the dirty water/clay mix was sent to a gravity sand filter to purify.
Though their final result was successful, the team ran into obstacles throughout the project. Griffith Laboratory held all the needed equipment, but space was limited, and it was difficult to access equipment. The ABS Engineering Center does not permit loud noise, which is difficult to avoid when using a rotary hammer drill.
In terms of the robot itself, the team had some parts machined for them by Protolabs, a rapid manufacturing company. “Some [parts] were sent back to us missing holes and features which we had to fix. Other times, it was our miscalculations that made certain parts that came back unusable,” said teammate Arjun Krishna, now a Mechanical Engineering graduate student with a concentration in Robotics & Control. “Finalizing the design took some time as we had several hard choices to make regarding how many drills we would use, how many extractors, the kind of drill bit, and even the logistics of using the machines on campus. Working with five other motivated individuals can also be stressful at times, but over the course of the project the team became like a type of family,” Krishna said.
When applying to enter the NASA RASC-AL competition, the team was one of 30 schools vying for 10 competition slots. As a rookie team, Stevens was unsure of its chances. But it was chosen to move forward, receiving a $10,000 stipend from NASA in two installments to build the robot. The two-day onsite competition began on June 5 at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia.
“I was very nervous about our final result the day before we left; we were testing our rig before we left and we had gotten our drill bit stuck in our testing material. We ended up having to cut away the test material in order to get our drill bit out. This was at 11 p.m. the night before we had to drive down to Virginia,” said Furrer.
By the end of the competition, however, it was clear that the team had done well. Judging began before they arrived; the team’s reports, midpoint reviews, video submissions, and final technical paper were all taken into account in the final scoring of the competition. During the competition, they were judged on the amount of water collected, whether the water was collected autonomously or not, how clean the water was, their analysis of the overburden layers (the material that lies above an area) they drilled through, as well as a short poster presentation.
“We were able to drill through the overburden rather quickly; we were the second team to begin extracting water behind MIT, and we ended up having the cleanest water and the best ‘digital core’ — our analysis of what materials we were drilling through — in the competition,” Furrer said. The senior design team placed second behind West Virginia University. MIT received honorable mention.
“The competition was a lot of fun,” said Krishna. “We got to tour the NASA Facility and met a lot of amazing people. The other teams there were really friendly, and it was very cool to see how other teams chose to solve the same problem.”
With both NASA and SpaceX planning visits to the Moon and Mars in the near future, this project is extremely important in determining whether or not extracting water from the planet is possible. “At the beginning of the competition, one of the judges told everyone that NASA was watching these designs and that ‘a part or several parts of [our] design may end up on an actual Mars mission in the future,’” said Krishna. Fellow teammate and Stevens graduate Nicholas Sorrentino, who works as a product design engineer at Lincoln Electric, emphasized that “if humans want to explore space, or even colonize Mars, then a water extraction system is hypercritical. Water is not only needed for life to exist but is also the most plentiful source of fuel. It would be a large stepping stone in the right direction to explore our solar system.”
The project allowed both Sorrentino and Furrer to develop new skills outside a classroom setting. “I respect all of the book learning and controlled experiments we do, but I value the ability for students who haven’t built anything to go at a fresh problem with no guidance. It really makes you think and design things. You learn what works and what doesn’t,” said Sorrentino.
For Krishna, the project helped him develop and advance new skills while furthering his career goals. “I’ve always loved building things since middle school. In high school, I was on the robotics team for four years and captain during my fourth year. Those four years doing FIRST Robotics really cemented the idea of going into engineering in my head. This competition reminded me of the time I had in high school building and testing robots late at night when everyone had gone home for the day. It’s my goal to one day work at NASA and, having done this competition, I feel like I have my foot in the door for the future.”
When offering advice to other aspiring engineers, both Krishna and Furrer agreed on surrounding yourself with others that have similar life goals. “Find an idea or project that you’re willing to put all your weight behind. Ask yourself, if you come across a roadblock in your project or idea, would you turn around or keep going? Just as important, surround yourself with people who feel the same way,” said Furrer.
“My advice would be to stay focused on what you want to achieve and to surround yourself with people who are passionate about the same things you are. You’ll never know what connections you might make so it is always important to get to know people in the field you are interested in,” said Krishna.
Sorrentino added, “Go into it with all you have. Design and build as much as you can, and hang in there when ideas don’t work out. Problems will arise that no one saw coming. You have to be able to adapt on the fly and not let failure slow you down.”
Be First to Comment