UKRAINIAN DEVELOPERS TEAM WON NASA SPACE APPS CHALLENGE

The MarsHopper project team

As it known, Ukraine has given the world a lot of talented inventors, scientists and developers, who made a great contribution to the world's science. And now we are proud to mention another success of the Ukrainian developers.

Few days ago the Ukrainian developers team with their MarsHopper Project won the People’s Choice Award in NASA’s Space Apps Challenge 2016. 

Before the project’s victory in the international contest, it passed through a competition in Ukraine and won it in two nominations. Later, the MarsHopper Project was chosen among 128 international teams, in result of which it got into the top five. After that the voting became global.

Worth note, that there was another Ukrainian project in the finals - Asterion-CYA. The main idea of the project is to use a special method to identify asteroids that are theoretically dangerous for our planet by employing the machine learning science. 

The MarsHopper team found out about its victory on May 23, tree days before the official announcement, but the official letter from NASA asked to keep it in secret.

“I hope that NASA got interested in our project. If it’s so, we would like for Ukraine to join it too. We were counting on it when worked on this project since most technologies to implement it are available in Ukraine. It would be wonderful for our country to take its rightful place among the world's space-faring nations.

If you go to the project website and click on the link to our presentation on YouTube, you'll see that the number of views is more than 44 000. It was the largest among all the projects since the beginning. While our competitors had about of 5000 - 6000 and only in the last day the amount of their views rose to 15 000. In addition, NASA's representatives wrote us that they were analyzing the traffic on Facebook and we had the highest points,”

– says Oleksandr Butkaliuk  for the ain.ua

The project proposes an alternative technology for traveling on the surface of Mars. The developers from Kirovograd city developed an analog of a jetpack and a model of rocketplane using carbon dioxide for fuel.

More specifically - the MarsHopper is a plane for investigation of Mars poles and its surroundings. It uses CO2, that in solid form covers surface to create jet thrust. During landing, plane harvest CO2 for next flight and for its deceleration. On the surface plane accumulates radioisotope energy into CO2, by changing it phase from solid to supercritical fluid. Supercritical CO2 is used to create jet thrust for next jump and to create rotation of propellers to sustain flight, hence the name of plane “hopper.”

Now the team is planning to create two prototypes of the inventionfor terrestrial and stratospheric tests. In addition, the guys are preparing to wisit Cape Canaveral to view a rocket launch that will take place on September 8 and participate in other program events organized by NASA. The team does not know yet whether all of them will be able to go there. 

The the MarsHopper team includes:

Pavlo Pravdiukov – Big Data Engineer, took part in physical calculations and as a team-lead. Loves astronomy and music.

Oleksandr Butkaliuk – Mechanical engineer, designer, private entrepreneur. Loves aerospace technologies, boatbuilding, sailing, glider flights.

Sofyia Butkaliuk – Lyceum student, idea generator. Loves space technologies, science fiction, space cartoons, steampunk.

Mykola Denysenko – Producer, chemist, made computer simulation (Unity3D, C#), 3D model. Loves rocketry, photography and game development.

Viacheslav Osaulenko – PhD student at NTUU KPI. Made physical calculations for MarsHopper. Passionate about computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Ilya Rubinsky – Programmer. Assisted in computer simulation development and presentation. Loves to play music and read books.

Andriy Muzychenko – Hardware engineer, computer science tutor. Loves green technologies, aerospace technologies and history.

Source: Ain.ua, Euromaidanpress