For the first time, students of an engineering college Toc-H Institute of Science and Technology (TIST) in Kerala have been selected for competing in the University Rover Challenge (URC) in the US to design and build the next generation of Mars rovers that will one day work alongside human explorers in the field.
If all goes well, the Mars exploration mission of the US in the near future will have a rover designed by this team of engineering. Apart from the URC 2014, the five-member team from TIST at Arakkunam will also compete with students from across the world in the prestigious international aeronautical contest — CanSat — in the US. The purpose of the CanSat is to mimic the functions of an actual satellite, and thus it is an intertwining of various fields of engineering.
While the CanSat competition will be held in Texas in June, the URC will be held at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the remote barren desert of southern Utah (US) in May 2014. The URC is the world's premier robotics competition for college students.