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UVA Team a Finalist in NASA Competition

University of Virginia

If humans ever decide to colonize Mars, we’ll need a source of energy, so NASA is sponsoring a competition to design the best system for getting it. A team of students at the University of Virginia has made it through the first round of competition.

It’s been nearly 50 years since America put men on the moon, and a new generation of college students were not even born when that happened.  For them, the mission is Mars, and for humans to survive there we’ll need an artificial atmosphere created, in part, with electricity.

“Energy is the fundamental thing for existence.  Every aspect of what we do needs energy, so this is really a first step.”

That’s Professor Mool Gupta, an electrical engineer and faculty advisor to a team of five students who have come up with a bold idea.  They suggest a flexible sheet of material that could absorb energy from the sun and convert it to electricity. Gupta says it would require little infrastructure, create no waste and be renewable.

“You don’t need wires.  Each person can tap the sun power and generate electricity, and that’s not for one year or 100 years, but it could be for billions of years.”

This thin solar sheet – the size of a baseball field -- could be rolled up for easy transport on a spaceship, then used to cover giant balloons, filled with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere. They’d be tethered to the surface of Mars – high enough to avoid dust.  Student Matt Julian says the next big challenge is coming up with a name for this novel technology.

“If we know anything about NASA it’s that they love their acronyms, so I think we need to think of something catchy to sort of grab their eye.”

UVA was one of five schools named semi-finalists in the competition. They’ll make their pitch in early March.  And what will the winner get? Student Elisa Pantoja says it’s something very rare and valuable to 21st century college students.

“Actually the prize is an internship with them during the summer.”

And they’ll get a free trip to NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio to present their proposal. 

Sandy Hausman is Radio IQ's Charlottesville Bureau Chief