We are thrilled to announce the teams who will be advancing to Development Period in the Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload Challenge, the Sequel!
We received 10 proposals from all corners of the globe and are excited to share that NASA is increasing the prize pool by $65,000 to $740,000 in order to fund four projects through the development period.
The winning teams, in no particular order, are:
Puli Lunar Water Snooper by Puli Space Technologies - $225,000
Puli Space Technologies is exploring the rough lunar terrains & harsh lunar environment with an experienced team of engineers and scientists passionate about the Moon http://pulispace.com
Sun Slicer - Miniaturized XRAY Spectrometer by Team Sun Slicer - $225,000
Team Sun Slicer is a collection of agile veteran Scientists and Engineers that are passionate about developing flight-ready hardware and then performing the enabled science.
uRAD, A Micro-Scale Lunar Radiation Detector by Christian Haughwout and Thomas (Joey) Murphy - $65,000
uRAD is proposed by a two-person team comprised of Christian Haughwout and Thomas (Joey) Murphy. Christian is a 5th-year graduate student at MIT pursuing a PhD in space systems engineering in the department of aeronautics and astronautics. Joey is a second-year graduate student at MIT, expecting to receive a master’s degree in space systems engineering in Spring of 2021, and continuing on to earn a PhD.
Lunar surface Energetic neutrals Analyzer (LEA) by Team LEA - $225,000
LEA instrument will be designed, developed, tested, and calibrated by a consortium of organizations led by Zentrum für Telematik (ZfT), Würzburg, Germany
Honorable Mention
We would also like to recognize the Monash Nova Rover Payload Team for their proposal “Permittivity Analysis of Regolith using SansEC” with an Honorable Mention award. Although this team will not be advancing to Phase 2, NASA would like to commend them for their excellent submission. The Monash Nova Rover Payload Team is a team of engineering and science students from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who entered the challenge. All 10 submissions were of incredibly high caliber and the judging panel had a very difficult task selecting the four submissions to advance to Phase 2.
We would also like to thank all of our supporters, partners, judges, and anyone else who in any way contributed to our competition community. Without you, we would not have had the challenge that we did.
