A team of eight graduate and undergraduate researchers from GT-AE’s Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL) has taken home a top honor in the NASA-NIA Revolutionary Aerospace Concepts Academic Linkage (“RASC-AL”) competition.

A team of eight  graduate and undergraduate researchers from GT-AE’s Aerospace Systems Design Lab (ASDL) has taken home a top honor in the NASA-NIA Revolutionary Aerospace Concepts Academic Linkage (“RASC-AL”) competition, held June 14-17 in Cocoa Beach, FL.

Coordinated by ASDL research engineer Stephen Edwards, ASDL’s Team SCHEMA took home first place in RASC-AL’s graduate division for its submission in the Earth Independent Mars Pioneering Architecture (EIMPA) category.

ASDL director Dimitri Mavris was not surprised by his team's success.

"These are among the most dedicated students at Georgia Tech," he said. "I am very proud of them."

The team’s Self-sustaining Colony for Human Exploration of Mars (SCHEMA) proposed a development plan for establishing a colony of 24 people on the surface of Mars that would achieve complete self-sufficiency by the year 2054.

“The team did an outstanding job of putting together a colonization plan, and generated meaningful modeling and simulation results that proved their design’s ability to fully satisfied a list of very difficult budgetary and schedule constraints,”  said Edwards, the faculty supervisor.

Joining Edwards in the presentation of SCHEMA were graduate studentsNishant PrasadhRobert Moss, Christopher Jenista, Yann Charront, Michael Steffens, and undergraduates Nicole Davis, Akshay Prasad, and Akshay Bakane.

Other teams competing in this division were the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, Drexel University, The University of Texas, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

The EIMPA category was one of four that RASC-AL organizers designed as a way to get tomorrow’s engineers thinking strategically about how to further space exploration. RASC-AL organizers said they have set their sights far beyond the Earth’s orbit, where the challenges are much more complex:

“Deep space missions like the journey to Mars will require humans to travel for long periods of time and to live and work independently from Earth, without the frequent resupply shipments. That means understanding the impact of utilizing resources both from the moon and Mars, and figuring out if their use is viable will be critically important to sustainable human exploration.”

The other categories included in the RASC-AL competition were Earth Independent Lunar Pioneering Architecture, Mars Moons Prospector Mission, and Large-scale Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) Pathfinder Mission.

The concept proposed by the SCHEMA team employs a whole suite of in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies designed to extract water, oxygenand other necessary resources from the Martian soil and atmosphere.

The proposed colony structure is composed of 15 cylindrical modules, each divided into workshops, farms, and living quarters. Power for the colony is provided by a molten salt Thorium Nuclear Reactor, as Thorium is also a resource that is available on Mars.

The colony is also equipped with a number of staffed and robotic rovers which provide surface mobility to serve construction, mining, and science needs.

RASC-AL Aerospace Concepts is a prestigious university-level design competition sponsored by NASA and managed by the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA). University teams from around the country submitted abstract proposals that described possible solutions to one of four challenge themes. Based on these submissions select teams were invited to provide a written report, poster presentation, and oral presentation at the 2015 RASCAL Forum, where the final competition took place.