A rendering of MATRIX, the technology developed by the Illinois Space Society team for the RASC-AL competition.
CEE student Qatrin Andina was part of a multi-disciplinary Grainger Engineering team that was selected to present their space missions design at NASA's annual Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts - Academic Linkage competition. Each year, the RASC-AL competition challenges undergraduate and graduate-level teams in the U.S. to develop new concepts that improve capabilities to operate on the Moon and Mars. Learn more>>
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A rendering of MATRIX, the technology developed by the Illinois Space Society team for the RASC-AL competition.
For the 13th year straight, a team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was selected to present their space mission design at NASA’s annual Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage competition. RASC-AL is a NASA competition that challenges teams of undergraduate and graduate students in the US to develop big-picture, systems-level mission designs. This year’s mission was to develop lunar technologies that leverage materials available on the moon.
The team, comprised of students from 13 disciplines across the University of Illinois — including from nine departments in The Grainger College of Engineering — included civil and environmental engineering student Qatrin Andina.
Following the competition's prompt to create technologies that leverage materials native to space, the team developed MATRIX — Mining and Advanced Transformation of Regolith for Infrastructure and eXpansion. MATRIX facilitates the mining, sorting, and product extraction from regolith, a type of dust found in copious quantities on the moon, to create landing and launch pad tiles.