Hundreds of students came together to design, build, and test rovers on an Earth obstacle course to prepare for the moon.
Space exploration starts with a lot of hard work on Earth. And in this new photo, we can see a hardworking student team putting the pedal to the metal in a rover their team designed and built for NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge (HERC).
What is it?
Every year, hundreds of students from around the world participate in HERC, a nine-month long challenge to design and build human-powered or remote-controlled rovers that could be capable of traveling across the moon’s surface.
After months and months of designing, developing, building, and testing, the teams put their rovers to the ultimate challenge with a final event in Huntsville Alabama where NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is located. At this event, which took place in April, 2026, the students drove and/or remotely operated their rovers through a specially designed half-mile obstacle course to see how they might really fare on the lunar surface.
Why is it incredible?
HERC is open to students ranging from middle school to college-age. This year, students from 28 colleges and universities, 13 high schools, and one middle school from around the world participated. This year, the 32nd year of HERC taking place, 600 students as part of 44 different teams took part in the challenge.
This event gives students of all different ages and from a variety of backgrounds the opportunity to work with real-life space science problems like “how will we get around on the moon?” And as part of this challenge, NASA provides the student teams with access to NASA subject matter experts and space industry professionals to help guide them through their project.
These teams, in addition to thinking big and working together on their rovers, also have to complete a design review, an operational readiness review, a mission readiness review, and an excursion readiness review before competing in this obstacle course — similar to how real spaceflight hardware is developed. This challenge gives these students a uniquely realistic look at what it might take to really get a piece of technology ready for the moon.