Team Mars Rover Manipal, the team from Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT), has bagged the third position in the second edition of International Rover Design Challenge (IRDC), organised by the Mars Society South Asia (MSSA). As many as 32 teams from four countries participated in the IRDC 2021.
MSSA is the official chapter of the Mars Society for the South Asian region. The Mars Society is the world's largest, most influential space advocacy organisation dedicated to the human exploration and settlement of Mars. Team Mars Rover Manipal had 30 members from the second and third year engineering batches of MIT.
A statement said that the team was expected to carefully plan each subsystem of the Rover, considering various extraterrestrial conditions and parameters in the design. A 26-page report, which included CAD, simulation, PCBs, graphs, and flowcharts, were submitted alongside a short video. The competition was entirely virtual.
Congratulating the team, Cdr Anil Rana, Director of MIT, said it has made MIT and the entire MAHE (Manipal Academy of Higher Education) very proud of your grit and determination. (MIT is the constituent institution of MAHE.)
IRDC, which is an online competition for university students, challenges students to design Mars Rovers that are fully equipped and mission-ready for actual operations on Mars. Students are encouraged to be as imaginative, creative, and insightful as possible within the practical, implementable limits of humans. The competition took place during July-September.