March 21st, Virginia Tech KTU exhibitors

Astrobotics

Putting men on Mars is a much larger task than putting them on the moon. The distance between Mars and Earth varies due to their different orbits around the sun. At favorable positions both planets are still at least 56 million kilometers apart. These favorable positions occur about every 2 years. The moon is on average less than 400,000 kilometers from earth. Using current propulsion technologies it takes about 300 days to reach Mars from Earth.  All that makes it difficult and expensive to provide supplies from earth to mars. Especially critical for a human presence on mars are fuel, oxygen and water. The goal of VT Astrobotics is to design and build a robot that can mine materials used to produce these substances and others necessary for a Mars mission.

Astrobotics

Virginia Tech Astrobotics is a multidisciplinary team with the goal of designing and building a rover to compete in the NASA Robotic Mining Competition. The purpose of this competition is to simulate in a Martian environment the extracting and recovering minerals and valuable resources necessary for space travel and exploration.

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Special Senses

How do your body recognize what happens in the environment? In our exhibit medical students from Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine will interact with you to demonstrate the Special Senses. You will learn that 1) Touch is part of the sensory system and it is more than using our hands to feel things. Our skin helps us to recognized difference in temperature, vibrations, texture, pressure and pain. 2) The visual system can trick us with optical illusion due bright light and contrasting patterns. It is the mental processing that determines how we see the world. 3) The auditory system detects sound vibration and we can identify where the sounds come from because we have two ears on each side of our head. 4) Taste and Smell are the chemical senses and they are very close related.

VTCSOM Basic Sciences Department

Volunteers students and a faculty from Basic Sciences from Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine (Roanoke, VA).