Undergrad team wins 2nd place in national NASA competition

A team of undergraduate students in aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, and physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was awarded second place in NASA’s Human Lander Challenge.  The team presented a system-level solution to mitigate plume-surface interactions during final descent and landing on the moon.

The HuLC competition invites college students to partner with NASA’s efforts to explore innovative solutions for a variety of known human landing system challenges in the transportation in deep space carrying humans to and from the surface of the moon for NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program.

Over an intense two days in June at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the U of I team joined 11 other university teams who were selected as finalists to expand on their initial proposal. They gave a presentation, answered questions from the judges, and staffed a poster session. All of this was part of the extensive evaluation process, which included a technical report submitted in advance.

Their project, “HINDER: Holistic Integration of Navigational Dynamics for Erosion Reduction,” uses a three-phase approach to select landing sites with reduced plume-surface interaction in the absence of dedicated infrastructure.

“We proposed a mitigation strategy for lunar plume surface interaction that employs radar-based surface characterization and landing site selection,” said aerospace junior Shikhar Kesarwani who served as the project manager. “This strategy begins with mission planning, utilizing existing radar lunar datasets to identify a landing site with favorable soil characteristics. The site selection is further refined in-flight during the final approach using a state-of-the-art radar system. These radar measurements, combined with existing sensor suites for hazard detection and avoidance, guide real-time trajectory corrections to minimize the adverse effects of plume surface interactions.”

Kesarwani said it is a minimally intrusive solution that can be implemented onto NASA’s human landing system at a low cost and within the five-year timeline given by the competition guidelines.

He said, one of the major hurdles the team encountered was the complexity of plume surface interaction, a field that demands extensive research to understand, let alone to devise solutions that mitigate its adverse effects on lunar lander safety.

“To overcome this, we worked diligently to understand PSI and develop effective solutions and consulted with our advisers to verify our understanding of plume surface interactions and the validity of our proposed solutions. Their guidance and expertise were invaluable in helping us navigate this complex field,” Kesarwani said. “We also had team members who had participated in NASA’s RASC-AL competition previously. Their experience was instrumental in guiding the design process and teaching newer members how to navigate a system engineering solution. Their insights helped streamline our approach and ensured that our solutions were robust and well-informed.”

In addition to Kesarwani, the other aerospace students on the team included seniors Brody Lauer and Chen Li; juniors Ishaan Bansal and Galen Sieck; and sophomores Benjamin Ochs and Sahilkrishna Vazhatodhyil. The mechanical engineering students were junior Krisha Mahajan and sophomore Adam Pawlik. From physics was first-student Ethan Kooper and sophomore Aparna Kamath, as well as Cliff Sun, who is majoring in physics and math.

The team advisers were Laura Villafañe Roca and her Ph.D. student Nicolas Rasmont from the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

“This is a great achievement by a team of our finest and more fearless students,” Villafañe said. “It was led, proposed, and developed independently, on their own merit, with me and my Ph.D. student Nicolas providing them with minimal guidance on their ideas, goals, and final products. We were not part of the team.”

Villafañe pointed out that the team was young. Of the 12 members, half were first- and second-year students and only two were seniors. By way of comparison, the University of Michigan and University of Colorado Boulder teams that took first and third places, respectively, were comprised in part or in total by Ph.D. students.

“Illinois had seven undergrad students up at the podium at NASA Marshall presenting their work,” she said. “I am extremely proud of what they achieved in one year of hard, independent work. The U of I team did an excellent job, gave a spotless presentation, and a gracious performance in answering the difficult jury questions.”

Visit the HuLC website to view all of the teams’ posters, technical papers, and slides. You can watch Illinois’ presentation on day one of the competition, beginning 54 minutes into the video recording.

The Human Lander Challenge is sponsored by NASA’s Human Landing System Program and managed by the National Institute of Aerospace.