The International Planetary Aerial Systems (IPAS) Challenge, organized by Mars Society South Asia, is a competition for university students which challenges to design Mars Aerial System (Vehicle) which shall be fully equipped and mission ready for operation on Mars.
Themed “Propelling Exploration”, the virtual event consisted of 26 teams competing against each other.
Team Interplanetar, BUET’s Mars Rover Team, has seized the Innovation Award for devising the most innovative gas compression system at the International Planetary Aerial System Challenge (IPAS) 2021. Not only that the team has achieved the first position in Bangladesh and ranked eighth globally.
All the teams had to plan and execute each subsystem of a smart aerial system considering various extra-terrestrial parameters in the design. Though Team Interplanater , BUET Mars Rover Team has previously took part in and worked on different rover challenges it was the very first we participated in IPAS challenge and worked on designing of any aerial system from scratch. Nirveek V1.0 – our first ever drone design to carry out interplanetary exploration and to give real time data without any system failure. The whole drone body is made with the most thoughtful planning from our team, from structure designing to materials. Several airfoil analyses have been performed to craft the best possible propeller design. We designed a 3D model with the help of software explaining all the necessary details. For science mission we also designed a chamber to protect electronics from being damaged in extreme low temperature. Furthermore, we performed the whole flight simulation in ROS to check all the parameters of performance.
Due to Covid-19, it was not possible to do the full mechanical and hardware manufacturing for any of the teams. So the competition was based on the EDR (Engineering Design Report) where Team Interplanetar successfully submitted their EDR.