ROLLA — A Missouri University of Science and Technology scholar helped prepare future scientists. Hickman High School Graduate Chase Stem is the chief of the World Champion Mars Rover Design Team at Rolla’s Missouri University of S&T. Stem serves because the CEO of the student-run volunteer group.
Members of the Mars Rover Design Team design and build new competition-ready Mars rovers every year. Student replicas imitate the actual NASA rovers that discover Mars with a number of cameras. The group competes yearly on the University Rover Challenge on the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah. As the CEO, Stem oversees all features of the coed group.
Stem stated, “The benefit of us creating these rovers is experience. We on the Mars Rover Design Team have a saying, we are people building people, not people building a rover. That means we are building ourselves as leaders, problem solvers, and engineers.”
The Mars Rover Design Team had greater than 100 students from engineering and science majors. Stem stated his volunteer group operated like a small engineering firm, with specialised sub-teams accountable for totally different components of the Rover. Stem’s final title is the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Stem stated he had at all times been obsessed with chasing STEM, even earlier than he understood what the acronym stem meant.
Stem stated, “We build from the ground up. We do studies of everything that we decide on. We don’t just commit to things because they worked in the past. We commit to things because we know they work well.”
The Mars Rover Design Team has an annual rover reveal ceremony the place students reveal their months of design and manufacturing work in the course of the previous yr. This yr’s reveal was scheduled for Saturday, March 7 at 2 p.m. in Missouri S&T’s Innovation Lab in Rolla. That’s when Stem and his group deliberate to disclose each their new rover and its title.