Students from the Space Resources Graduate program at Mines won second place and $75,000 for their proposed Lunar Ice Digging System, or LIDS at the NASA Break the Ice Lunar Challenge. LIDS would include three rovers – excavator, regolith hauler, and water hauler, as well as a communications and navigation system. Both haulers would have robotic arms for assembly, maintenance, and repairs. All three vehicles would be teleoperated from a nearby lunar surface habitat. LIDS is composed of Hunter Danque, Eric Luken, Ben Pemble, Joseph Kenrick, Matthew Rehberg, Michael Forlife, Timofey Broslav, and Maxwell Sissman.
In addition. Austere Engineering of Littleton, Colorado, which won third place and $50,000 for its Grading and Rotating for Water Located in Excavated Regolith (GROWLER) system is a new start-up company formed by graduate students of the Space Resources Graduate program led by Curtis Purrington.