Martian pioneers will have to live off the land in Mars to survive but how will that be possible in a world without plants, trees, animals, water and good old Earth?

That's the thorny and life-threatening question a NASA competition called the 7th Annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition (RMC) now taking place in Florida is trying to answer.

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Living off the land today is referred to as "In-Situ Resource Utilization" or ISRU by NASA and those in the space community. Competitors at RMU are focusing their brain power on developing the technologies necessary to extract consumables such as oxygen and water to support human life on Mars. These consumables will also allow colonists to produce methane fuel for their spacecraft.

These as yet undeveloped technologies can also be used to mine source materials in-situ for building landing pads, buildings and other important infrastructure. All these activities will need mining tools, specifically smart mining robots that can act on their own. Hence, the need for RMU.

RMC challenges college students to design and build a mining robot that can travel over a simulated Martian surface, excavate regolith (or the Martian soil) and deposit as much of it as possible into a bin, all within 10 minutes.

Team members may control their bots remotely from a trailer where their only line of sight is via a computer screen. Or, they can control their robot autonomously using their programming skills. NASA is basically crowdsourcing ideas from smart college students that want to be part of NASA's journey to Mars.

NASA directly benefits from RMC with the clever ideas and solutions that could be applied to an actual excavation device or payload. The unique physical properties of basaltic regolith on Mars and the reduced, one-third gravity make excavation a difficult technical challenge.

NASA will use data from this competition to improve its Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot or RASSOR.

One critical resource on Mars is water ice, which can be found buried in the regolith where it is well insulated. During RMC, teams have to dig for gravel under the soil surface that simulate this ice. NASA says there's at least five percent water in the Martian soil.

TagsNASA, Robotic Mining Competition, In-Situ Resource Utilization, Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot, RASSOR