Smead Aerospace students earned third place in the 2024 NASA Human Lander Challenge.
PhD students Ella Schauss (Advisor: Allison Hayman) and Amrita Singh (Advisor: James Nabity) represented the University of Colorado Boulder in the inaugural NASA event, which called for student teams to design solutions to manage Moon dust kicked up by lunar landings.
The pair were announced as one of 12 university team finalists earlier this year, advancing them to the final leg of the challenge in Huntsville, Alabama in June.
Dust mitigation during landing is one of the key challenges NASA will have to address in exploring the lunar South Pole region and establishing a long-term human presence on the Moon.
Participants in the competition developed proposed systems-level solutions that could be potentially implemented within the next 3-5 years to manage or prevent clouds of dust – called lunar plume surface interaction – that form as a spacecraft touches down on the Moon.
Schauss and Singh's proposal was titled “Lunar Surface Assessment Tool (LSAT): A Simulation of Lunar Dust Dynamics for Risk Analysis.”
Student and faculty advisor attendees at the competition had the opportunity to network and interact with NASA and industry subject matter experts who are actively working on NASA’s Human Landing System capabilities, giving participants a unique insight to careers and operations that further the agency’s mission of human space exploration.