A team of engineering students at South Dakota State University is going up against national and international student groups—along with professional space development corporations—to create never-before-seen technology for a NASA competition.
About 20 students are building a rover designed to excavate moon soil, or regolith, to extract ice from its surface as part of the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge. Their team, Space Trajectory, is one of 15 finalists competing in the second phase of the two-year contest.
"The goal of the Break the Ice challenge is to develop new technologies that have never been built or tested anywhere on Earth ... to be able to excavate icy regolith from areas of the Moon that we’ve never been to,” said Todd Letcher, project adviser and associate professor in mechanical engineering at SDSU.
The project began in January of 2021. In Phase One, the team designed an excavator to move lunar dirt completely autonomously. The first level of Phase Two had groups develop their designs and begin the testing process.
"The way they run these competitions usually is that they are looking for interesting, creative ideas that are also realistic, that could work,” Letcher said.
In the second level of Phase Two, teams are constructing full-sized rovers to put their designs to the test. Space Trajectory is building a four-part system to excavate and transport this soil: the main excavator, a dump truck, a battery charging station and a rover to swap batteries.
The system must be able to run for 15 days straight and excavate 1,760 pounds of soil per day. The equipment must also be made completely of metal to survive the moon’s conditions.
Austin Lohsandt, a mechanical engineering graduate student, is one of three current team members who originally participated in the project in 2021. He’s now lead designer of the excavation arm for the rover and has taken on a leadership role.
"Being a year up on these guys on the project, I have a little bit more background knowledge about the project than my younger classmates, as well as they kind of look to me for inspiration,” Lohsandt said. “I help lead the project as best as I can.”
The project has also revised Lohsandt’s plans for after graduate school.
“Since my senior design project senior year of college here and then into my graduate school, my focus has really shifted from manufacturing more to the research and development side of things,” he said. “I really gravitate towards that side of innovation and design.”
Another student on the project, senior mechanical engineering major Allea Klauenberg, has been working on the challenge since last January. She said the experience has been both rewarding and educational as she prepares to graduate and enter the work force.
“The aspect of working with a larger team, and now that we’re building stuff, working with the machinery and stuff like that,” she said of what she’s learned from the project. “But it’s been a great experience overall and I’m excited to keep working on it.”
Klauenberg leads the energy team for Space Trajectory. She and her team members must create the equipment to transport and charge the batteries for the excavator.
Judges from NASA will arrive sometime during their building process to see how the team is progressing. Space Trajectory will first test its equipment at home, and if chosen to advance to the next level, will then travel to a NASA center to try the rovers in a lunar simulation.
“I think just being at a NASA location and being around people, real NASA engineers would be really exciting,” Klauenberg said.
This is not the first NASA challenge SDSU has participated in. In 2021, Letcher led another team of students to design a drill meant to extract water from the moon and Mars. He is overseeing a second group this year that's creating technology to retrieve data from high-altitude balloons.
SDSU has already won $63,500 by advancing this far in the contest. If they make it to the next level of Phase Two, they have a chance to win another $1 million. That money will either go back to the engineering department to fund future projects or, if students are interested, possibly go to creating a company with graduating team members to finish the challenge.
But Letcher said the experience also offers students an opportunity to explore new ideas.
"It’s really fun to get to work on challenging problems and see the students go through the same thought process that I’m going through,” he said. “And we come up with ideas, brainstorm, work on those ideas, come up with better ideas, test them. It’s a very fun process.”
The team members will be testing their equipment later this spring, including a durability test in May.
