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M O N I TO R OCTOBER 27, 2016
OHLONE COLLEGE
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YASH KUMAR ROHAN
Ohlone student Yash Kumar Johar explorining the facilities at NASA Ames.
Student works on robots at NASA YUMYAT THWE STAFF WRITER
Years from now, when man finally takes flight for planet Mars, some ideas from an Ohlone student may be a small part of the effort. Yash Kumar Johar, a firstyear Ohlone student, spent four days at the NASA facility in Mountain View last month. He was selected for the “Mission to Mars” program along with promising science students from many other schools. Johar said he had an amazing time interacting with the other science students, coming up with ideas, and spending time together. According to Johar, all the students were put into four groups of 10. The students were given different roles, such as project manager, budget manager, test engineer, software engineer, chief engineer, assembly engineer, etc. Johar took the role of the test engineer. Each group represented different imaginary public compa-
nies, and Johar’s company was “Green Martian Innovators.” Their moto was, “To Turn the Red Planet Green” refering to Mars, and the ‘Green’ refers to a living environment similar to Earth. They were given a $600 million budget to work with, an imaginary budget of course. The team had to buy the parts that will be using for the prototype from that budget. Even for the smallest part, the cost they had to pay was around $ 4 million. Johar said the experience that he gained was, “Amazing, and it was something really different from what I expected.” What he expected was to design a prototype that will work in the Mars environment. However, he was not expecting to be in such a real-life-situation, with realistic problems such as tight budgets, tight time frame, and group communications. The teams had to deal with public outreach as well. But he said, “It was fun!” “Once you go there and actually start doing it, you realize
that how difficult and stressful it actually is. When we were designing, we were not sure, we were just there,” said Johar. All groups were given two missions: 1) To build a robot that will pick up rocks on mars 2) To build a robot that will pick up broken parts of previous robots on Mars It was a four-day program; an introduction day, two missions, and a conclusion day where teams presented their projects, met with NASA scientists, reviewed resumes, and explored the NASA Ames facility. Johar said the first mission was difficult for all teams because they were thrown onto the field without any preparations. None of the students had experience. The communication between team members was fine. All of them were smart, and knew what they were doing. For the first mission - designing a robot that would pick up rocks on Mars, NASA created a room with a Mars environment, including rocks on random
spots, and a volcano. The team couldn’t decide on what they wanted their robot to do at first. They came up with many ideas. “What would happen on the Mars surface?” said Johar. “Does the robot want to turn? How it wants to collect the rocks? Does it want to pick rocks more than one together? Does it just want to go back and forth, straight to one direction and come back? Does it want to take a U-turn and come back? What does it going to use to sense the rocks? Is it going to use sound sensor, or gyroscope? Will it use a color sensor?” The team also considered friction on Mars. Johar said the robot they designed should not have a lot of friction. “You don’t want it to fall over, or bounce off, because the rocks are going to be heavy for the robot. And it will be collecting multiple rocks, and we need to be careful that when the robot turns, the rocks won’t be too heavy,” said Johar. NASA charged for everything the team wanted extra even though the budget was imaginary. The teams were given two minutes to look at the environment, and how big the rocks and the volcano were. “Two minutes is enough, but it’s not really that enough to look at every details. You don’t know this is the starting point and so on.” The team decided whether they should use the color sensor or gyroscope. They ended up using the gyroscope, which can detect items more effectively. Then, the team also had to deal with Olympus mons, the biggest volcano on Mars. In the artificial environment of Mars, NASA had a gem set up at the top of the volcano. The team members thought about picking it up, but they aborted the idea, since the volcano was huge and the robot wouldn’t be able to climb up. The robot was a little less Continued on Page 5