A youth from Vizag and his team excel at NASA’s Break The Ice Challenge

It is a proud moment for a Vizag youth and his team AA-Star, which was among the top 10 in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Break the Ice Challenge. The global level competition had teams from 48 countries and AA-Star was the only team from India to stand in the top 10, hence bagging a reward of $25,000. On Friday, Ashish and his team received the news through a NASA webinar that they had finished in the top 10 of the competition.

Among the trio, Karanam Sai Ashish Kumar is from Vizag, while Pranav Prasad is from Washington, USA and Amareswara Prasad Chunduru is from Tenali. Interested in science and technology, Ashish started learning from a very young age. But it was during his undergraduate program that this youth from Vizag developed an interest in designing and took various courses in the same. He pursued his Master’s degree in Machine Design, from Vizag, and has since worked with many organisations as a Design and Product Engineer. 

Ashish reveals that the team name, AA stands for Ashish and Amar and Star is meant for their projects. Ashish and Amar are both alumni of Andhra University. This is not the first time that the team AA-Star has impressed the folks at NASA. They earlier came as a finalist in October 2020 in NASA’s Gantry Challenge conducted by GRABCAD & NASA. Later, they won third prize in NASA’s Lunar Delivery Challenge in March 2021 which was conducted by HeroX & NASA. For this, they won a $2,000 cash prize. 

Speaking to Yo! Vizag, Sai Ashish Kumar said, “This was quite a challenging task for our team where we were going head-to-head with scientists, astronauts and big companies participating in the competition. The majority are research-funding companies. Only we have participated as individuals.” Being into research direction, Ashish and Amar, who together run a startup named KKB Tech Solutions, have done more than 10 projects. On their future goals, Ashish says that he is more into research and is looking for investment by research companies. 

NASA’s Break the Ice Challenge 

This is a part of NASA’s prestigious Centennial Challenge series. The Centennial Challenge series mainly focuses on NASA’s Back to Moon ‘Artemis Program 2024’. The theme of the project is to design a Lunar vehicle that can excavate and extract water from icy regolith on the lunar surface detected by Chandrayan-1 earlier in 2008 at the lunar South Pole. A total of 374 teams, from 48 countries, registered for the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge. The challenge started in November 2020 and ended in June 2021. This is Phase 1 of the competition. Phase 2, starting in November 2021, involves working on a prototype with NASA in the USA for almost 2 years. NASA is expected to announce in September 2021 who is qualifying for this phase.