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Italy-based Team Space4Life has won the first opportunity in more than 40 years to send an experiment to the lunar surface under the Lab2Moon Global Challenge for youth, called out by TeamIndus, in a privately funded initiative.
Earlier, Team Indus became the only Indian team to qualify for the $30-million Google Lunar XPrize, that will land a rover on the Moon by the year end.
Team Space4Life comprising Mattia (16), Dario (22) and Altea (18) proposed an experiment to test the effectiveness of using a colony of Cyanobacteria as a shield against harmful radiation in space. The team’s prototype met the stringent criteria of weighing less than 250 gm, being the size of a regular soda can and being able to connect to the spacecraft’s on-board computer.
Team Zoi from India, comprising a brother-sister duo — Santosh (25) and Sukanya Roychowdhury (22) along with Arizona-based Autumn Conner (24), which proposed an experiment to explore photosynthesis on the Moon, was placed second; their experiment will also fly to the Moon.
Both the teams will now work closely with TeamIndus engineers to make their experiments space worthy, for the journey of a lifetime. Lab2Moon inspired over 3,000 teams from 15 countries including the US, India, Italy, Spain, the UK and Peru, to send in ideas for experiments that will help build sustainable life on the Moon. Twenty five teams were shortlisted, of which 15 teams made prototypes that were presented over the last three days in Bengaluru to an international jury comprising K Kasturirangan, former Chairman of ISRO; Alain Bensoussan, former President of CNES and former Chairman of Council, European Space Agency and Priyamvada Natarajan, Professor, Department of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University.
On what made Team Space4Life the winning choice, Natarajan said: “We looked at the exploitation of the opportunity, the relevance to the potential future of human establishment on the Moon, the feasibility, scalability and the demonstration that this is workable. The rigour, creativity of the idea and how radical it is in terms of not just how it related to previous work but, the vision was a case of passion combined with vision.” Providing perspective to what it means to future space exploration, she said: “If you look at the exploration of space in the last few years, with the discovery of all these extra solar planets, our cosmic vista of how important we are as a species has taken on a special urgency. The amazing space prophet Konstantin Tsiolkovsky realised 150 years ago that the problem of human beings colonising space is not going to be an engineering limitation but will be a biological problem.”
The key issue therefore, she pointed out, is going to be whether we as human beings can survive in other climes — on the Moon, or in Mars or elsewhere. We were really impressed with the range of ideas that were biologically motivated and those that were motivated by Physics, she said. Six additional teams also qualified to fly to the moon, of which Team Callisto, TeamEARS and Team Kalpana are from India; Team Killa Lab (Peru), Team Lunadome (UK), Team Regolith Revolution (United States).
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