The Final Run 2013

The impressive 2nd run of the AACT Moonbuggy Race, 2013.  Nabbed us 8th place overall in a competitive international field of high schools and universities.

Moonbuggy 2013 Wrap Up

The Reno Gazette Journal gave the team a nice spread today to wrap up this year's Moonbuggy project.

Here's an excerpt but the rest of the story is here.

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Budding high school engineers from the Academy of Arts, Careers and Technology in Reno overcame a catastrophic first-round breakdown to place seventh in the high school division and eighth overall in the NASA Moonbuggy Race over the weekend.

The six-member team then snapped up the Neil Armstrong Award for Best Design at the competition held at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.

“They were not bummed out when it failed catastrophically; that’s the best learning,” said team adviser Dan Ruby, associate director of the Fleischmann Planetarium and Science Center at the University of Nevada, Reno.

This year’s team was Philip Nowak, John Sandusky, Silvia Quiroz-Perez, Danny Aguirre, Jason Christensen and Morgan Strohschein.

The vehicle’s chassis crumpled when the drivers hit an obstacle in the course, Ruby said, but the students repaired the buggy in time for Saturday’s competition, where they turned in a time of 3 minutes and 41 seconds around a punishing lunar-landscape track, finishing only 18 seconds off the winning time.

“We were trying to be as light as we could and still hold up,” said Addison Wilhite, a teacher at the academy and team adviser. “We erred on the side of too light and had to reinforce it for the second run.”

Even with the breakdown, the team members “kept their head in the game, responded well and came back with a great performance,” Wilhite said.

The race is an engineering challenge for high school and college-level students to conceive, design, build and operate pedal-powered vehicles, then race them around a ¾-mile course of simulated lunar terrain of rocks, ruts and craters. The human-powered moonbuggies must meet stringent criteria and carry an array of equipment.

The Neil Armstrong award was special “because this is an engineering competition,” Ruby said. “For us, that was more important than placing in the race.”

Judges for the Armstrong award included some of the engineers who worked on the original lunar lander or “moonbuggy” used in NASA’s Apollo moon-landing program in the 1970s, Ruby said.