Kobie Boykins Laboratory, working on trips from Mars to planet Earth. Kobie Boykins is a senior mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Boykins has now been working at NASA for 22 years and enjoys working in the laboratory as of 1996. He worked with his team to design the solar array systems for the Mars exploration rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity", and designed the actuators on the Mars rover "Curiosity," the name of both wings. This system generates power so the Mars Rover can operate while on Mars. Two rechargeable batteries are held inside the Mars Exploration Rover; these
NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge The NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge, prior to 2014 referred to as the Great Moonbuggy Race, is an annual competition for high school and college students to design, build, and race human-powered, collapsible vehicles over simulated lunar/Martian terrain. NASA sponsors the competition, first held in 1994, and, since 1996, the U.S. Space & Rocket Center hosts. Students created vehicles dubbed "moonbuggies" to face challenges similar to those engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center addressed in preparation for Apollo 15. On that mission, on July 31, 1971, the first Lunar Roving Vehicle extended the range