TIST team invited for Mars rover design contest

Kochi: A team of five students from Kerala has been selected for an international competition in the US for designing a rover for Mars mission.
The team from Toc-H Institute of Science and Technology (TIST) is among the 31 teams selected for University Rover Challenge (URC) from six countries.
This is for the first time a team from an engineering college in Kerala is selected for competing in the URC in the US. The team will also compete in CanSaT in US organised by American Astronautical Society (AAS) and American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics (AIAA) in association with NASA.
While the CanSat competition will be held in Texas in June, the URC will be held at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the remote barren desert of southern Utah in May. The URC is the world's premier robotics competition for college students.
The six countries sending teams for the competition are the US, India, Egypt, Poland, Canada and Bangladesh. The students are from prestigious institutions, including Yale University, Cornell University and the Warsaw University of Technology.
It is for the second consecutive year that a team from TIST has been selected for the CanSat.
The five members of TIST team are: Muhammed Juhaim Ibnu Abdul Jabbar, PV Abimanyu Nair, Jibin Jose, Anoop Nayak and Joseph Stephen. The team’s faculty advisors are Kiran George Varghese and Shajan K Thomas.