News service

Our students will compete in the final of the Mars Colony Prize world competition this weekend

Publication date: 
2019/10/17
A competing team of students from India, a project created at the University of Kiruna, Sweden, finals in CTU colours. This may be the way to victory in the Mars Colony Prize space competition, which will culminate on Saturday, 19 October in Los Angeles, to award the best proposal for building a sustainable Mars colony for thousands of people. Among the ten teams that advanced to the finals of the contest is the Dvaraka team from the European master's study program SpaceMaster, which is sent to the struggle by the Department of Control Engineering of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering.

The Mars Colony Prize is hosted by Mars Society, the world's largest organization dedicated to supporting Mars research and settlement. Out of the 100 submitted projects, a team of students called Dvaraka, who are studying within the European Master’s program SpaceMaster at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, CTU, ranked among the 10 finalists of the competition. Its deputy Alice Phen will present the proposal on Saturday, 19 October, to a panel of judges and participants at the 22nd International congress of Mars Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The goal of the Mars Colony Prize is to design a colony for the first 1,000 people on Mars that can provide all the food, clothing, accommodation, energy, common consumer products, vehicles and machines with only a minimum of key components such as advanced electronics to be shipped from Earth.
 

All students from the Dvaraka team come from India, and their successful design was created during their first year of the master's program, which the students of the SpaceMaster program undertook beyond the Arctic Circle in Kiruna, Sweden. The good news about advancing to the finals reached them shortly after their arrival at CTU in Prague, where they will complete their second year and will write and defend their diploma thesis. The SpaceMaster master’s program is an example of a project that has been supported by the European Union and is now - similar to the planned Mars colony - truly self-sufficient, as it continues successfully after funding ended. The SpaceMaster study program cooperates with 7 universities and  11 students are currently studying at CTU.