Regardless of the disbelief I still have, Iām super excited to report that we are the grand prize winners of NASAās Watts on the Moon Challenge! š Every person on this team, including many others not pictured here, played an absolutely critical role in bringing this project to success and it was a joy working with you all.
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The goal of the competition was to design and build the lowest mass and highest efficiency system for distributing power across a 3km distance on the lunar surface, which is a difficult problem to solve in the cryogenically cold vacuum environment on the moon. The competition is in support of NASAās Artemis mission to send humans back to the moon, which will require a robust power infrastructure.
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The dream of winning this challenge seemed like a far off possibility four years ago when we entered the competition in the midst of the pandemic. After numerous iterations and redesigns and a wild scramble in the last week to finalize everything before the ship date, we successfully delivered a fully operational system which performed flawlessly within the simulated lunar environment at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, OH.
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Press release linked in bio š
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#NASA #UCSB #Physics #Moon #Artemis
2025 was a bucket list year:
ā Shared the stage with Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, and Alan Parsons
ā Helped produce a Kurzgesagt video on our planetary defense research with over 5 million views (link in bio!)
ā Published a couple papers, talked at a couple conferences, couldnāt have done it without @brinnybailey
ā Produced almost 100TB of simulation data
ā Attended a life changing @bennygreb drum camp
ā Loved my friends and family even more than I thought was possible. Endlessly grateful for the people in my life (couldnāt tag everyone, yāall know who you are ā¤ļø)
