NASA: 5 Telangana students short-listed for Human Exploration Rover Challenge

NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge will witness the participation of five students from an engineering college in Telangana. The students from the SR Engineering College, Warangal, will take part in the fifth annual challenge.

The NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge will be held on April 12-14, 2018, in Huntsville, Alabama, US. 

Total four teams from India have been short-listed for the challenge, while students belonging to as many as 23 countries are competing in the challenge. All they need to do is create a buggey designed to traverse the simulated lunar surface.

The team, led by faculty Manoj Chaudhary, will create a moon buggy design and will be required to submit their idea. The team includes P Paul Vineeth, Prakash Raineni, P Sravan Rao, Rondla Dilipreddy Aand Venishetty Sneha, said a statement. 

SR Engineering College Secretary A.Madhukar Reddy congratulated the students and said it was a great opportunity to build, design and test technologies that allow rovers to perform in a variety of environments, ET reported.

First held in 1994, 25 years after the first manned Apollo landing on the moon, the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge began as the NASA Great Moonbuggy Race. 

The focus of the challenge is now on NASA's current plans to explore planets, moons, asteroids and comets. 

During the 20-year period, the Great Moonbuggy Race involved over 10,000 students. It also revealed that these budding scientists and engineers were capable of complex work.

Gravity governs the movements of the cosmos. It can even bring galaxies so close that they begin to tug at one another, causing them to abandon their former identities and merge to form a single accumulation of gas, dust and stars. In this Hubble Space Telescope image is one such interaction where a galaxy called IC 1727 is currently interacting with its near neighbor galaxy, NGC 672 (which is just out of frame). The pair’s interactions have triggered peculiar and intriguing phenomena within both objects — most noticeably in IC 1727. The galaxy’s structure is visibly twisted and asymmetric, and its bright nucleus has been dragged off-center. In interacting galaxies such as these, astronomers often see signs of intense star formation (in episodic flurries known as starbursts) and spot newly-formed star clusters. They are thought to be caused by gravity churning, redistributing and compacting the gas and dust. In fact, astronomers have analyzed the star formation within IC 1727 and NGC 672 and discovered something interesting — observations show that simultaneous bursts of star formation occurred in both galaxies some 20 to 30 and 450 to 750 million years ago. The most likely explanation for this is that the galaxies are indeed an interacting pair, approaching each other every so often and swirling up gas and dust as they pass close by. Image Credit: NASA/ESA #nasa #space #science #astronomy #hubble #telescope #galaxy #stars #pictureoftheday #picoftheday

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This is a dwarf spiral galaxy named NGC 5949. Thanks to its proximity to Earth — it sits at a distance of around 44 million light-years from us, placing it within the Milky Way’s cosmic neighborhood — NGC 5949 is a perfect target for astronomers to study dwarf galaxies. With a mass of about a hundredth that of the Milky Way, NGC 5949 is a relatively bulky example of a dwarf galaxy. Its classification as a dwarf is due to its relatively small number of constituent stars, but the galaxy’s loosely-bound spiral arms also place it in the category of barred spirals. This structure is just visible in this Hubble Space Telescope image, which shows the galaxy as a bright yet ill-defined pinwheel. Despite its small proportions, NGC 5949’s proximity has meant that its light can be picked up by fairly small telescopes, something that facilitated its discovery by the astronomer William Herschel in 1801. Credit: ESA/NASA #nasa #space #science #astronomy #hubble #telescope #galaxy #stars #pictureoftheday #picoftheday

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