Miners in Space: Mo. S&T students work on NASA project

If NASA ever sends astronauts to Mars, about a dozen students at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla can brag they were part of the effort.

The team is called Miners in Space. This year, 11 engineering students from Missouri S&T are participating in NASA’s Micro-g Next design challenge. One of 25 academic teams involved nationwide, the Miners selected from a handful of options the “Anchoring Device in Regolith” challenge, which aims to find the best designed anchor to attach to the surface of an asteroid.

Through NASA’s asteroid redirect project, the federal space agency wants to develop new technologies for a human mission to the Martian system in the 2030s. Part of its goal is to capture an asteroid and put it in the moon’s orbit for astronauts to study.

“In that neighborhood, astronauts and scientists would have relatively easy access to the asteroid to study and better understand the history of our solar system,” said Miners team adviser Hank Pernicka.

The team is designing an anchor as a first point of contact in a low-gravity, or “micro-g,” environment.

“It would be something of a dry rehearsal for the longer, more complicated flight to Mars,” Pernicka said.

The Miners’ anchor is designed with a hollow tube and an auger inside to screw the device at least 6 inches deep into the asteroid surface, typically consisting of loose layers of sand and rock. The tube includes “wings” that deploy and need to be as neutrally buoyant as possible to ensure it couldn’t easily be dislodged.

Much of the team’s early efforts centered on micro-g research and testing.

“The concept of micro-gravity itself takes some time to wrap your head around,” said Jill Davis, a senior aerospace engineering student from Brookline. “Now, we are in the phase where we are making prototypes.”

The team is working against a late May deadline to submit a professional prototype for testing at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Davis, vice president of Miners in Space and a Republic High School graduate, said the students submit monthly reports to NASA documenting their solutions and problems.

NASA engineer Cody Kelly works with the Miners in Space as a team mentor.

“Currently, the team is working on developing prototype tools for spacewalking that will be evaluated here at NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab. I’ve been extremely impressed with their ingenuity and skills in mechanical design and prototyping,” he said in an email.

Kelly has a history with Missouri S&T having worked with the Miners in Space team in 2014 as part of NASA’s Microgravity University program. The students created and performed experiments during flights on a NASA microgravity aircraft.

Pernicka, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, said the school’s relationship with NASA dates back to 2002.

“NASA had a program that we participated in where students propose and fly experiments in its weightless wonder aircraft, which is commonly known as the ‘vomit comet,’” he said.

For about eight years, Pernicka’s students ran experiments through the Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program before it was discontinued in 2014.

“One of the experiments was a small spacecraft propulsion system, which we are actually putting on a small satellite that my students are developing right now for the Air Force. It won a competition about a year ago, so the Air Force is finding a launch for this spacecraft into low-Earth orbit most likely in the next couple of years,” Pernicka said.

As for the Micro-g Next challenge, Pernicka said a key component is student outreach as NASA hopes to inspire the next generation of aerospace engineers and astronauts.

He said the team is managing over 25 outreach events this academic year, mostly at schools in Missouri.

“It’s no little achievement for our students to do this,” he said, considering a full course load of college classes and project experimentation. “On top of those two things they take time out every two or three weeks to do an outreach event, which usually involves driving a couple of hours.”

NASA will pay the university $800 for reaching three performance gates – however, the 12-month program costs the school about $5,000.

“It helps defray some of our travel costs a little bit. The rest of our funding the students have to generate themselves,” Pernicka said. “NASA’s costs are very modest, and if the students happen to come up with a really good idea, then NASA gets a free idea, so to speak.”