Five Telangana students selected for NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge

Only four teams from India were shortlisted to compete in the NASA’s Rover Challenge.

Five students from a private engineering college in Telangana have been selected for the prestigious NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge.

NASA sign at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida. (Reuters File Photo)

The five-member team of students from the SR Engineering College in Warangal will now take part in the 5th annual NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge to be held in April 2018 in the US.

The students qualified for the final challenge after overcoming the selection criteria - to prepare a moon buggy, design, report and submit their idea that make their buggy work on the surface of moon, ensuring the safety of its passengers, according to the SR Engineering College.

“Only four teams from India were shortlisted to compete in the NASA’s Rover Challenge. Students from 23 countries are participating in this prestigious competition which challenges students to create a vehicle designed to traverse the simulated surface of another world,” the college said in a release here today.

The team, which will be led at the event by faculty Manoj Chaudhary, comprises P Paul Vineeth (final year ECE) Prakash Raineni (final mech), P Sravan Rao (final year ECE), R Dilip Reddy (final mech) and V Sneha (final civil), it said.

“We are excited and looking forward to this challenge since it makes us think concepts in `space exploration’ as a subject, which was something we had never considered before. We are confident our rover will conquer the challenge,” said the students.