CU Denver Students Take Second Place At NASA Rover Competition
DENVER (CBS4) - Some engineering students at University of Colorado Denver took on a challenge from NASA and took second place.
The challenge was to create a rover that can travel on another world.
On Friday, Kayla McDermott and her classmate put their feet to the pedals and flew around an obstacle course built by NASA in Huntsville, Alabama.
Their ride isn't like any vehicle ever built, it's a rover made by McDermott and the rest of the CU Denver Rover Team Odyssey.
The 14-person team built the craft to compete in the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge; and compete they did.
"We competed against 70 teams. Only 10 of the teams were able to even finish the course," McDermott said.
For much of the day Friday they were the fastest rover to take the course.
Eventually their time was beaten, but given how tough the competition was, they are still excited about their result.
"Taking second place… we're pretty proud of it," said McDermott.
The team worked on their rover for more than a year as a capstone project. This trip was just the cherry on top of a lot of hard work.
"It was an amazing team building experience. We got together as a team and we got to see our design come through really well," McDermott said.
This team poured their blood, sweat and tears into this machine, and they are over the moon with how well their design worked.
"To see something that you designed from scratch and built from scratch perform the way that it did and get the recognition that it did throughout the competition it was an unbelievable experience," she said.
LINK: CU Denver Rover Team Odyssey
Michael Abeyta is a 4th generation Coloradan and a Multimedia Journalist for CBS4. His stories can be seen on CBS4 News at 5 & 6. He is on Twitter! Follow him @AbeytaCBS4.
