DRIVING ANTARCTIC INNOVATION

WHY ANTARCTICA?

Currently, Antarctic researchers are deployed on blue ice fields to find meteorites. These researchers walk through the harsh winds and biting cold to find these meteorites.

This makes current meteorite research in Antarctica dangerous, unsustainable, and inefficient. Team Polar's mission is to create an autonomous, affordable, and sustainable research rover to facilitate research in the continent and improve the current human lead research.

OUR SOLUTION

How do we make research more efficient in practice? The concrete aspects that make research inefficient are human involvement when obtaining the data, causing more time and resources to be spent on the field and fossil fuels power research infrastructure. To solve these problems research equipment needs to be made sustainable, autonomous, and affordable.

SUSTAINABLE

Making research equipment functional on sustainable energy like solar energy ensures that it's not limited by range. For example, a vehicle in Antarctica does not need to return to a research station to refuel since it will obtain all its power from the Sun while driving. This allows research to be performed virtually infinitely.

AUTONOMOUS

Autonomous control ensures that no human needs to operate the equipment. Not only does this remove the need to keep the vehicle warm and transport all of the human necessities for survival. Having a vehicle that moves on its own allows for faster and safer meteorite-related field reserach

THE ROVER

AFFORDABLE

For new technologies to be competitive, they must not break the bank. It turns out that by eliminating the reliance on fossil fuels and removing the human operator costs can be saved when traversing the Antarctic continent. This effectively makes research cheaper while improving efficiency.