Cardinal Space Mining (formally Cyclone Space Mining) began as a senior design project for the NASA Lunabotics Mining Competition. After becoming an official student organization, the club rapidly grew and is a leader on campus for innovation, leadership, and engineering knowledge.
Each year we design and build a robot capable of mining in a Martian environment. We compete with about 50 teams from all around the world at Kennedy Space Center in Florida with a goal to collect as much regolith, or Martian soil, as possible in a 10 minute run. Other components to the competition include demonstration of K-12 STEM outreach, team spirit and a systems paper with a presentation.