The Recent 2025 CoSMIC Space Mining Competition Awards

We are pleased to announce that SDSU won the following awards at the 2025 CoSMIC Space Mining Competition held at Iowa State University:

Overall competition: Second Place
Construction: Second Place
Autonomy: First Place
 

This competition included highly ranked NASA Lunabotics collegiate teams including Virginia Tech, University of Minnesota, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of North Dakota and others. 

The objective of this year’s competition was to build a rover capable of operating on the lunar surface to build a berm from Regolith.  Rover weight, dimensions, power consumption, communications bandwidth consumption, autonomous operation, dust proofing and other factors were considered.

On the first day of competition, SDSU immediately gained respect given our team’s performance.  The majority of the competing teams have had over a decade of experience in Lunabotics, whereas SDSU is a relatively newcomer with this being only our fourth year.

Our student team is comprised of ten Mechanical Engineering students and five Electrical & Computer Engineering students split into two sub-teams, one for the rover propulsion, navigation and control, and one for the Regolith digging and handling.  This team of SDSU Engineering students researched, designed, analyzed, fabricated, assembled and extensively tested their rover in just nine months during the 2024-2025 Academic Year as part of their Senior Design Capstone program.  

The competition was live-broadcasted via YouTube each day.  You can search YouTube using “CoSMIC 2025 - Day 1” (2 or 3) to find the videos (we ran on day 1 and 3).  Our team’s name was: Collegiate Rover for Extra-Planetary Excavation and Deposition (CREED).

Go Aztecs!  Well done team CREED!