Indian team wins NASA prize for designing human settlement on Mars in 48 hours

Florida, Aug 11: A team of students from the Amity International School here has won the prestigious 20th Annual International Space Settlement Design Competition, 2015, held at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA.

The Amity team comprised 12 students -- Dhruv Khanna, Aabhas Vaish, Aman Agarwal, Anuj Harisinghani, Rishab Srivastava, Chittaranjan Prasad, Suchit Jain, Rahul Rajput, Tanay Asija, Anant Chaturvedi, Grishma Purewal from Class XI and Mudit Gupta from Class X.

The final round of Space Settlement Design Competition, held between August 2-4, saw participation of '4 companies' with 50 participants each from all over the world who were competing for the title.

Amity International School principal Renu Singh said that her students were in a company called 'Vulture Aviation' and were clubbed with teams from Latin America and North America and two selected team finalists from the UK and USA.

The Amity team designed two main settlements and four outlying settlements to accommodate a population of 24,000 as well as a transient of 3,000 more on Mars using a transparent material, 'Aluminium Oxinitride'.

While designing the settlement, the team members worked on aspects such as Automation Engineering, Operations Engineering, Human Engineering, Marketing and Finance, Schedule and Cost.

The team worked on the design for 48 hours. Presenting a brief about the project, Aabhas Vaish said that the Mars Space Settlement was named 'Argonom Bult' and proposed to be designed inside a crater.

He further added that the selection of location for the Mars colony depended on the quality of soil and amount of dust storm in the particular area.

He said that the total cost involved in building a colony for 24,000 habitants would be 1,225,571,360,000 dollars.

The International Space Settlement Design Competition is a prestigious contest which aims to impart industrial skills in students.

The competition puts high school students in the shoes of aerospace engineers.

PTI