BYU Mars Rover: Science Module Optics

Overview

Every senior in my major at BYU is required to do a capstone project on a sponsored team. While most of these are smaller proof of concept projects, I decided to apply to participate in a competition team instead. I applied to the BYU mars rover team, which participates in the international University Rover Competition (URC).

The mars rover team has been, so far, an excellent opportunity to work on a cross-disciplinary engineering project in a large team of 40 people. We have electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, geologists, biologists, and computer scientists. My subteam alone has at least one person from each of these backgrounds. To be specific, I’m on the astrobiology subteam, where we have to collect soil samples from a depth of 10cm and run experiments to try to detect life.

My role

I’ve been working with geologists and biologists on both a pre-existing life detection system and a new one that we are adding to the rover. We inherited a fluoresence detector built by last year’s team (none of whom are on the module this year, so my small subteam now has complete ownership), and we are both trying to improve this detection and implement some form of chemical analysis.

I’ve only been on the team for a few weeks so far, and we’ve spent a lot of time creating system requirements matrices and running tests on the rover we inherited from last year’s team. I’ll try to update this page in 8 months or so once I’ve finished my work on the rover and can state with more confidence what I’ve done, but I’m excited to work in this very different environment with a lot of very smart people with different backgrounds. I think we’ll accomplish something great!