Bangladesh becomes Nasa Space Apps champion

Bangladesh has clinched the world championship title in 2021’s Nasa Space Apps Challenge-National Hack-a-Thon for the second time.

Team Mohakash from Khulna has secured top place by beating 4,534 teams from 162 countries in the best mission concept category, reads a press release.

The "ARSS-Advanced Regolith Sampler System", a tool invented by Team Mohakash, will enable astronauts to control the dust that flies freely during the mission to the surface of the aliens.

In past human missions to the moon, astronauts had been facing troubles working amid surface dust and at low gravity, dust particles get easily raised and floated, making it difficult for astronauts to collect samples, as well as ionizing due to cosmic radiation, which could have a high possibility of damaging the spacesuit. 

Team Mohakash invented an effective solution to this problem, inventing a toolset that traps these dust particles in a closed chamber and prevents the dust from floating.

The Information and Communication Technology State Minister, Zunaid Ahmed Palak, MP, has expressed his excitement over the unprecedented success of Bangladesh in the Nasa Space Apps Challenge 2021.

Team Mohakash’s team leader Sumit Chanda said: "It is always a matter of pride to be able to represent our country to the world. We have worked on a solution that the world's largest space research organizations including Nasa are still researching. We have been working on this project since last year, with Basis as the biggest contributor. They have always helped us to achieve our goals through direct mentorship. We are grateful to our university teachers and seniors, for teaching us how to deal with problems and how to use them efficiently".

More than eight hundred projects were submitted from Bangladesh in this year's edition of the international competition of Nasa Space Apps Challenge, organized in collaboration with Basis and Basis Students Forum.

After scrapping the incomplete projects, representatives from 125 projects participated in the 48-hour hackathon, and the best 27 projects were nominated by Nasa from Bangladesh.

It was organized in nine cities of Bangladesh, in Dhaka, Chattogram, Sylhet, Rajshahi, Khulna, Barisal, Rangpur, Mymensingh and Comilla.