JARROD HOMER

Despite the challenge being cancelled, our team completed our prototype and wrote a 16-page technical paper detailing our prototype and data collected... The RASC-AL MMIP Challenge is a National Challenge that has been run by NASA and the National Institute of Aerospace for the past 5 years. Undergraduate and Graduate students from across the country were tasked with creating proposals for systems capable of extracting and purifying water from subsurface ice, as well as identifying and characterizing the layers of regolith above the ice. Our team was one of 10 selected to receive a $10,000 development stipend to build a prototype of our system. Teams wrote 15-page technical papers and took part in an on-site competition demonstrating the systems. Teams were responsible for designing their prototypes around the Martian environment, and the majority of the technical paper addresses how the system deals with the challenges presented by space.