Students Take Third Place in NASA’s Moon Challenge | Ann and HJ Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences

Smead Aerospace students take third place in NASA’s 2024 Human Lander Challenge.

PhD students Ella Schauss (supervisor: Allison Hayman) and Amrita Singh (supervisor: James Nabity) represented the University of Colorado Boulder at the inaugural NASA event, where student teams were challenged to design solutions to deal with lunar dust kicked up during lunar landings.

The pair was announced this year as one of 12 university finalist teams, qualifying them for the competition finals in June at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Limiting dust during landing is one of the major challenges NASA will face as it explores the lunar south pole region and establishes a long-term human presence on the Moon.

Competition participants developed proposals for system solutions that could potentially be implemented within the next 3 to 5 years to manage dust clouds – called lunar plume-surface interaction – that form when spacecraft touch down on the lunar surface.

Schauss and Singh’s proposal was titled “The Lunar Surface Assessment Tool (LSAT): Simulation of Lunar Dust Dynamics for Risk Analysis.”

Students and supervisors participating in the competition had the opportunity to network and talk with NASA and industry experts who are actively working on NASA’s Human Landing System capabilities. Participants gained unique insight into the careers and operations that contribute to the agency’s mission of human space exploration.