By Ashley Morgan, Staff Writer
A design made by San Diego State students aimed at creating a spacecraft that allows astronauts to land on an asteroid won national recognition last month.
SDSU’s chapter of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics placed third and received $1000 for its 2009-10 proposal in the national organization’s Space Transportation Design Competition.
It was a “very satisfying and proud moment,” the project’s faculty adviser Dr. Nagy Nosseir said.
SDSU’s proposal, dubbed Human Exploration and Reconnaissance of a Massive Extraterrestrial Space-born object, was third to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which placed first, and Arizona State, which placed second.
“It was frustrating to still be beaten out, but one day we’ll do better than them,” team member and aerospace engineering senior Samantha Stoneman said. “But it felt pretty good because SDSU isn’t generally known as a top engineering school throughout the nation.”
According to a press release, requirements of the competition included a report in which students design a human asteroid exploration system that would send astronauts to a nearby Earth asteroid and return them safely to Earth with emphasis on technical content, originality and feasibility.
The team was comprised of Daniel Nelson as team leader, Andres Cedano, Jesse Cuevas, Tuan Luong, Eric Miller, Benjamin Pochop and Stoneman.
“For a school as the whole, at least the hope is, it might attract more students or maybe better students to our program, seeing that the students who are here currently can actually get national recognition,” Nelson said.
This year’s design was unique in the fact that the reentry vehicle intended to bring astronauts back to Earth was designed as a lifting body shaped similar to an airplane, as opposed to traditional vehicles shaped like capsules, Nelson said.
Nelson also attributes this year’s win to not procrastinating, a problem the team had in their first competition in 2008-2009 when they did not place, he said.
“This next year we have a new design contract and we are supposed to be designing a propellant depot, which is essentially a structure in space that holds different kinds of propellants for service such as satellites, unknown vehicles or even vehicles like the space shuttle,” Stoneman said. “This has been a historically small group of students who participate in this project, and it’s really unfortunate because it’s a great experience and it’s one of the better design projects available for engineers at SDSU.”
“This (win) gives me a lot of confidence … I learned a lot during this competition and I can continue doing it,” Cuevas said.
Some of the winning team members have elected to donate their portion of this year’s prize money back to the SDSU’s AIAA chapter, in hopes of supporting future endeavors and competitions in aerospace and aeronautics, Nelson said.
