Dartmouth Engineering Student Team Is NASA Competition Finalist

Team FLORA (l to r): Isabella Casaretto '26, Samuel Hirsh '26, Piper Gilbert '25 Th'26, Ava Rosenbaum '26, Jeancarlos Llerena '26, and Yeel Lee '26.

The Dartmouth team consists of five members of the Class of 2026: Isabella Casaretto '26, Samuel Hirsh '26, Yeel Lee '26, Jeancarlos Llerena '26, and Ava Rosenbaum '26, as well as Piper Gilbert '25 Th'26 who earned her BE at the end of winter term and started as a Master of Engineering Management (MEM) student. The team's faculty advisor is Professor Michael Kokko.

The competition invited university teams to address one of four mission themes relevant to NASA's Artemis program and long-term human missions to Mars. Addressing theme two: "Lunar Surface Power and Power Management and Distribution (PMAD) Architectures," the students entered their capstone design project, "Flywheel for Lunar Operations—Redundancy Architecture (FLORA)," that includes a novel flywheel energy storage system.

Capstone design projects such as this are facilitated by Dartmouth's Cook Engineering Design Center (CEDC), which helps connect student teams with problem-solving challenges like RASC-AL. "Project FLORA is a great example of the value of project-based learning at Dartmouth. The CEDC supports student growth in applying the human-centered engineering curriculum to a real-world project," said CEDC Director Emily Monroe.

Each team submitted an initial proposal paper and a two-minute video presentation (see below), which were evaluated by a review panel of NASA and aerospace industry experts.

During the RASC-AL Forum in June, students will present their work to NASA leaders, industry professionals, and fellow finalist teams. The top-performing teams will be recognized for technical merit, innovation, and presentation excellence.

Transcript

Cold nights, rugged terrain, and abrasive lunar dust: the moon presents great challenges to engineering efforts. Lunar South Pole exploration is not possible without novel infrastructure to generate, store, and distribute power to support critical systems. 

To enable NASA's sustained lunar evolution phase, we designed FLORA: the Flywheel for Lunar Operations—Redundancy Architecture. Our modular and fault-tolerant architecture incorporates NASA-backed technologies and a novel flywheel energy storage system.

SpaceX's Starship will deploy FLORA to the South Pole's connecting ridge and Shackleton crater rim. FLORA's deployment is broken into three phases:

1. Phase one establishes a ring micro-grid to support surface systems including habitats, life support, and early ISRU operations.
2. Phase two builds upon the initial micro-grid, scaling ISRU facilities to sustain production of transmission cables, solar panels, and flywheel components.
3. Phase three transitions to an expanded radial power network and incorporates grid meshing to provide redundancy.

At the core of FLORA is a flywheel energy storage system. The lunar vacuum minimizes aerodynamic drag losses, and cryogenic temperatures enable superconducting magnetic bearings, improving flywheel efficiency and lifespan. Our testing demonstrates flywheel charging, discharging, and storage, extrapolating loss models to full-scale lunar operation.

With a resilient, scalable architecture, FLORA turns the moon's harshest conditions into its greatest strengths, powering humanity's next giant leap towards Mars.