Lima Senior High School’s Rover Challenge Team brought home the award for Most Improved from the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala.
The team competed this past weekend along with nearly 100 high school and college teams from around the country. This is Lima Senior’s 12th year at the competition. It remains the only high school in Ohio to compete.
Lima Senior finished 12th among 30-plus high school teams. Its fastest time completing the course was 13:13 (13 minutes and 33 seconds). The winning team completed in 6:09. Some teams took as long as 30-plus minutes.
The Most Improved Award goes to a high school and college team that has the most improved time (greatest percent decrease in final run time) over the previous year.
The following are members of the LSH Rover Challenge Team: Javeon Anderson (driver for retrieval challenge, builder, videographer, photographer), Aaron Bennett, Peter Fike ((driver for retrieval challenge, builder, videographer, photographer), Lauryn Ford, Caleb Grundisch (welder/builder, design and build presenter), Jalinda Houston, Cameryn Moseley, Mitchell Nuckles, Matthew Nuckles, Skylar Quintero (driver), Josiah Shoemaker (driver, builder), Brandon Snider and Derek Snider (marketer).
Team advisers are teacher Gary Cearns and Donna Tucker.
The Rover Challenge focuses on designing, constructing and testing technologies for mobility devices to perform in different environments NASA explores, including moons, planets, asteroids and comets.
The rovers are human-powered and carry two students, one female and one male, over a half-mile obstacle course of simulated extraterrestrial terrain of craters, boulders, ridges, inclines, crevasses and ruts.
As part of the challenge, and before traversing the course, unassembled rovers must be carried by the drivers to the course starting line. The rovers are then assembled, readied for the race and evaluated for safety.