MIT student teams win top honors in NASA competition

Three MIT student teams comprising 35 students from eight departments won five top awards at NASA's 2026 RASC-AL competition. ECLIPSE took first place overall for designing a lunar power grid with 99.995% uptime using solar masts and buried microreactors. MELIORA won second place for a communications and navigation constellation scaling from 3 to 23 satellites, providing 100+ Mbps links and 10-meter positioning accuracy for both the moon and Mars. CHEESEBURGER won its theme category for a five-payload robotic campaign to mine lunar regolith into oxygen, metals, and bricks. The three designs are intentionally integrated: ECLIPSE powers CHEESEBURGER's processing, and CHEESEBURGER's regolith handling helps shield ECLIPSE's reactors, all targeting NASA's planned permanent lunar south pole base in the early 2030s.

Source: https://news.mit.edu/2026/interdisciplinary-mit-teams-design-power-communications-and-early-lunar-industries-win-top-0615. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.