NASA Mars to Table — Team Olympus

Overview

After hours during my Lincoln Laboratory internship, I worked with Team Olympus on the NASA Mars to Table Challenge. The team had about 40 people across roughly seven subteams, including automation, contamination, nutrition, and food production.

I worked on the systems team. This team looked across all of the subteams and worked closely with each of them.

My Contributions

• Built scripts to automate the nutrition team's data pipeline. The scripts planned meal ingredients, then matched them to crops by flavor profile and repeatability.
• Checked in with chefs to learn what works and what is easy to cook. Then narrowed the recipe list to what was feasible with a smaller set of cooking devices.
• For the contamination and waste-management team, I translated their research into design decisions, requirements, and control operations.
• My work was mostly Python scripting and data analysis, plus infrastructure design decisions. This was a step outside my usual mechanical engineering work.

The Team

Team Olympus drew members from 14 schools: UF, MIT, Purdue, UPenn, Harvard, Olin, Northeastern, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, Hult, the University of Oregon, the University of Delaware, UCF, and RISD. The team included PhDs, postdocs, professors, and undergrads. Most of them worked for NASA before this challenge.

I enjoyed working with this team.

Project Media

Team Olympus's submission video for the challenge.