Around Marshall

Students from across the United States and as far away as Puerto Rico and South America came to Huntsville, Alabama for the 9th annual Great Moonbuggy Race at the U.S. Space Rocket Center. Seventy-seven teams, representing high schools and colleges from 21 states, Puerto Rico, and Columbia, raced human powered vehicles over a lunar-like terrain. A team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, took the first place honor in the college division. In this photograph, the Cornell #1 team, the collegiate first place winner, maneuvers their vehicle through the course. Vehicles powered by two team members, one male and one female, raced one at a time over a half-mile obstacle course of simulated moonscape terrain. The competition is inspired by development, some 30 years ago, of the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), a program managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center. The LRV team had to design a compact, lightweight, all-terrain vehicle that could be transported to the Moon in the small Apollo spacecraft. The Great Moonbuggy Race challenges students to design and build a humanpowered vehicle so they will learn how to deal with real-world engineering problems similar to those faced by the actual NASA LRV team.