Two Portola Valley girls, Anna Cardinal and Virginia Phelps, with teammate Evan Cranston (Los Altos) earned the top award at the 20th annual Tech Challenge, Mars Crater Mission, held at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose on April 28.
With advisers David Cardinal (Portola Valley) and Gene Duval (Menlo Park), “Team Mars Bars” was awarded first place, Best Overall Solution, for meeting this year’s challenge, which involved 82 middle school teams from around the Bay Area.
The girls put in more than 60 hours each over the course of the project, which included design meetings at one of the girl’s homes and multiple trips to The Tech to try their prototypes on the museum’s test rig.
The challenge: Design, build, and operate an unmanned device that can survive a 12-foot drop into a Martian crater, and then successfully exit the crater by ascending a 6-foot crater wall. The Tech provided a simulated crater, with a padded drop zone and a textured crater wall and crater rim.
While the girls put in successful runs with two prototypes during the early testing phase, the girls continued to modify their design up until the morning of the event.
One week prior to the event, they discarded the cardboard “garage” that had protected their rover during the drop. Adviser Gene Duval said: “After each of those successful early runs, we encouraged the team to ‘freeze’ their design and focus on making sure it was rugged enough to survive the final challenge run on April 28. But they were so intent on making improvements, some large and some small, we couldn’t drag them away from it. They essentially took an untested version to Saturday’s final event.”
At Saturday’s contest, Team Mars Bars demonstrated a key feature of their design when their rover initially landed “upside down” after the drop. Born from a serendipitous fluke during the design phase, the ability to land on either side and still operate by righting itself as it began the climb up the “crater wall” was essential.
When the team ran the rover off the side of the ramp during its initial attempt up the 60-degree ramp, the judge offered a “reset” option, a manual manipulation of the machine to get it back on course but which would result in a point deduction. As the clock ran down toward the three-minute limit, the team responded, “No reset. We can drive it back on course.”
Team Mars Bars finished its run successfully in two minutes.
The girls began work on the project in early February as part of their eighth-grade science class under the guidance of veteran science teacher Eryl Barker at Castilleja School in Palo Alto.
About the author: Lorrie Duval is the mother of Anna Cardinal. Dave Cardinal is her husband and Gene Duval is her brother.
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