East Central students build Mars rover for NASA competition

Some East Central Hornets are heading to Huntsville to represent Mississippi at NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge.

This is the science club’s second year going and they’re ready for the competition.

“The next step in space exploration is finding planets with life and finding water and also being able to send [another] rover to Mars sometime in the future,” said science club president, Kameryn Bardwell. “So, that’s what this project is about. Getting us to build a rover that could actually go on Mars one day. But we build a rover and we go up to Huntsville in April and we race it on an obstacle course.

Last year, East Central competed against 11 countries and hundreds of high schools and colleges in the rain.

They’ve made the necessary changes to improve this year.

“We’ve chosen actually a pretty novel design,” said Jason Lee, who is head of engineering. “Most people go with four wheels, but we’ve made ours with three wheels. And we’ve made it mainly out of lightweight materials like fiberglass and aluminum because last year we had a very heavy rover, and that did not work very well.”

The rover is manned by two drivers, who must peddle the rover over obstacles. The rover has been completely built by the students with the supervision of their teacher, Shawn Chesser.

“So, we have a variety of problems and it teaches them a lot of different steps in big projects, how to manage through the steps of a big project and work with their resources,” Chesser said. “And, especially to be able to adapt and change when we run into problems that we can fix. And they’re going to see that we’re always going to run into problems that we can’t fix, so they can take it in, come back, and figure out how we’re going to do better next time.”

That is exactly what they have learned this year.

“We got up to Huntsville last year,” Kameryn Bardwell said. “and we didn’t do the best, but you learn best through mistakes and through failure, I believe.”

You can help the East Central Science Club get to Huntsville by donating to their fundraiser here.