Nagpur boy, Kerala girl in Mars mission design winning team

MUMBAI: A global team of university students which won a $10,000 international contest to design a mission to Mars has two Indians in it.

Kshitij Mall from Nagpur headed the prize-winning team while Kerala-born Ashwati Das played a key role in the project. The contest was organized by the US-based Inspiration Mars Foundation.

Kshitij and Ashwati are students of Purdue University in the US which has produced scores of astronauts including the first man to walk on moon Neil Armstrong.

In an e-mail interview to TOI, Kshitij who studied at Mount Carmel Convent School in Maharshtra's Chandrapur said, "The result shows Indians would play an important role in space travel and in shaping the future of humanity."

Around 32 teams from across the world took part in the contest to design a manned round-trip mission to Mars. They put together everything they learnt while a high-level panel of judges — current and former Nasa officials — evaluated their engineering proposals.

The challenge before them was to design a risk-free, cost-friendly and technologically simple mission. The team had to take care of life support systems within the spacecraft besides planning its launch, trajectory and return.

The non-profit organization Inspiration Mars Foundation founded by the world's first space tourist Dennis Tito aims to launch a manned mission to fly by Mars by 2021.

"At the drawing board we decided that the safety of astronauts was our priority. We strongly believed that at least one aspect of our design could eventually find its place in the travel of human beings to Mars," said Ashwati.

After about three months of work, 10 teams made it to the final round, including one from SV College of Engineering in Chennai. In August first week, the Inspiration Mars Foundation declared Kshitij's team, comprising students of Purdue and some Japanese universities, as the winner.

via-timesofindia

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