NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) organized the Lunabotics Mining Competition in which it challenged university level students to design and build a lunar excavator, known as a LUNABOT, that can mine on lunar surface. Kirori Mal College in collaboration with Cluster Innovation Centre, University of Delhi (whose Lunabot was on display at Antardhvani 2013) was one of the 50 International institutions invited to participate in NASA’s Fourth Annual Lunabotics The Mining Competition was held at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, USA from the 20th to 24th of May 2013. The KMC-CIC Lunabotics Team was one of the 12 exceptional teams whose Lunabot was successfully able to mine and dump the lunar simulant. It was the only Indian team to bring laurels to their country by winning two awards out of the five categories at the prestigious event. They won the second position for the outreach category as well as for Luna’s worldwide campaign category.
Dr. Sumitra Mohanty, Assoc Prof. Dept. of Physics was the faculty advisor of the team. The unflinching inspiration and support extended by her helped the team to scale to the projected heights. The team was led by Anubrata Saha a final year, B.Sc. (H) Physics student who the team described as the perfect leader who stays calm and refuses to give up even in the most difficult conditions. The competition was in relevance to NASA’s recently announced mission to find an asteroid by 2016 and then bring it to Cis-Lunar space; the technology concepts developed by the university teams for this competition conceivably could be used to mine resources on Asteroids as well as on Mars. KMC-CIC Lunabotics Team feels highly privileged to bring recognition to Delhi University and looks forward to continuing its engagement with NASA . It also aims to continue its winning streak at the NASA LMC 2014
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