For the 13th year straight, a team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was selected to present their space mission design at NASA’s annual Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage competition. RASC-AL is a NASA competition team that develops the entire, big-picture, systems-level mission design. This year’s mission was to develop lunar technologies that leverage materials available on the moon.
The team was made up of students from 13 disciplines – nine departments in The Grainger College of Engineering were represented, including aerospace, chemical, electrical, physics, civil, systems, nuclear, mechanical, and computer engineering. Students from other units on campus came from astronomy, data science, mathematics, and astrophysics. Remarkably, all but four of the 30-some team members were first- and second-year students.