Unnathi Prakash | Mercury Staff

Through the jungle of 3D printer filament, wires and scattered tools, hidden in the UTD Makerspace lab is a rover built for Mars. Founded to develop battle bots, Comet Robotics has embarked on its newest project to compete in the Mars Society University Rover Challenge. 

Officially founded in 2021 as Combat Robotics, the club functioned as a reboot of the old UTDbattle bots club, developing an array of small-scale combat robots and chess robots. Om Davra, a computer engineering senior and president of Comet Robotics, said that last summer the club turned a new page, changing its name and pivoting away from robotic warfare to focus on Mars.  

The rover project is dubbed Solis, meaning “sun” in Portuguese, and consists of test bed prototype Meu Zinha, “little one,” and the rover itself, O Leao, “the lion,” as an homage to the project manager’s Brazilian roots.   

“Some people would say we’re in a renaissance of the space age … [and] symptoms of that are efforts like the University Rover Challenge,” David Von Paumgartten, a mechanical engineering sophomore and the project manager of Solis, said. “Schools come together, and we just try to see who can make this thing work the best.”  

The University Rover Challenge is hosted by the Mars Society, a space advocacy organization dedicated to the research and settlement of Mars, and challenges college students to build a rover that could be useful on Mars expeditions. Conner Replogle, computer engineering sophomore and Chief of Engineering for the Solis project, said a rover is expected to autonomously navigate terrain, test for signs of life in soil samples, repair itself or other equipment and deliver packages in extreme conditions.  

“Some of the challenges [are] like typing on a keyboard, plugging in a USB stick: simulating how articulate you can be with the arm, and how it could help an astronaut out there,” Replogle said. “And then we have extreme delivery, which is, as you can imagine, pretty rough. It’s hills and rocks and boulders, everything you can imagine minus the water. You’ve got to be very innovative.”  

Currently, there are only two operating rovers on Mars: Curiosity and Perseverance, built by NASA. Rovers have been crucial in our understanding of the red planet by sending back data that showed traces of water in Martian soil and helping researchers from a better understanding of its history and potential use to humans.  

“Life is a pretty critical point of checking other planets out,” Von Paumgartten said. “We have to take multiple samples and try to check out different areas, see if it’s a little bit different here, it’s more habitable here.” 

The primary goal of Comet Robotics for their first season in the University Rover Challenge is to get a working prototype that satisfies the main requirements, then over the course of the following years, to perfect the design. The rover is still in development, building off its prototype test bed with a coding team concurrently developing its software. 

“We’re not expecting the first one to be perfect,” Von Paumgartten said. “But we try something out, we look at what worked, what didn’t work, and then research again, try to fix that, then go and develop it.”  

In June 2025, O Leao will be put to the test. While the competition date is distant, the rover needs to undergo rigorous testing beforehand. The test ground for the challenge is set in Utah, because of its extraterrestrial, desert-like environment that resembles Martian terrain. Davra said he finds the grassy, rocky area left behind by the removed Classroom Buildings to be the perfect place to practice driving the rover. On top of navigating difficult topography, Von Paumgartten said preventing dirt and sand from wrecking the electronic systems is crucial for O Leao’s success. 

Sand is a rover-killer. In 2019, NASA announced the retirement of its longest-running rover, Opportunity, who was crucial in the discovery of an area that could have sustained microbial life on Mars. Its communication and processing systems were taken out by a vicious sandstorm in 2018. Similarly, China’s Zhurong rover went dormant in May 2022 and simply never woke up, potentially because of Mars dust covering its solar panels and preventing it from generating energy. For rovers, maintaining a barrier from sand and environmental dangers is their most crucial function.  

In the face of these challenges, the team remains optimistic about the rover and its development. Replogle encouraged new people to join regardless of how much time someone can offer to the project. 

“Even if you don’t have time to actually build something, it’s helpful to have, let’s say, [someone who] knows a lot about radio systems, right? It’s helpful just to have [them] in the Discord so that [they] can tell us something,” Replogle said. “It’s about evolving intellectually.”  

Like the branch of Comet Robotics that develops battle bots, the Solis team aims to compete in the University Rover Challenge for years to come. 

“After this year, the real fun starts,” Replogle said. “Because we could just try some random, really cool things — if it doesn’t work, let’s just go back to what we were using before.”  

The ultimate goal of the Solis project is to maintain a permanent team that has more freedom to develop new technologies. Since the rover requirements for the University Rover Challenge are mostly unchanged from previous years, maintaining a base build opens doors for further experimentation.  

“The most exciting and exhilarating part of this whole process is getting to see something new every day, getting to see new people and new ideas every day,” Von Paumgartten said. “It’s very inspiring for an engineer … We would love to be competitive, but [the goal is for] our people [to] walk away saying, ‘You know, we learned something and we’ll come back tomorrow.’”