Lima Senior High School’s Rover Challenge team will again race in the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge.
This is the 14th year Lima Senior has sent a team to the international competition held at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. It has consistently been the only high school in the state to compete in the contest, formerly called the Great Moonbuggy Race.
The Rover Challenge is April 13 and 14. The race can be watched live here.
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.
The top three times in each division (one high school and one college university division) will be those having the shortest total times in assembling their rovers and traversing the course. Each team is permitted two runs of the course.