Ukrainian project of marzoleta won the NASA competition. VIDEO

Photo: YouTube / MarsHopper screenshot

The Ukrainian project MarsHopper became the winner of the international Space Apps Challenge competition, which was held by NASA for the fifth year in a row, in the “Audience Award” category.

A team from Kyiv proposes an alternative technology for moving on the surface of Mars, for which an analogue of a jetpack and a model of a rocket plane using carbon dioxide as fuel have been developed. Such a device will move around the planet by jumping, which is why it is called MarsHopper - from the English word grasshopper (“grasshopper”).

“I hope we have attracted NASA's interest in our project. If this is so, then I would like Ukraine to join it. When we developed the project, we counted on this: almost all the technologies for its implementation are available in Ukraine. It would be wonderful if our country took its rightful place among the “space” countries,” project engineer Alexander Butkalyuk told AIN.ua.

World Hackathon, as they call software developer forums annually gathers tens of thousands of students, engineers and other professionals around the world.

Как сообщает The official website of the competition, the Ukrainians scored the most votes on the results of online voting. At the same time, until the last day, they occupied only the third place with a large gap from the leaders. However, the organizers of the competition analyzed the results of the vote, and the Ukrainian team was higher than their rivals.

“If you go to the project website and follow the link to our presentation on YouTube, you will see that the number of views is more than 44 thousand, the largest among all projects from the very beginning. Our competitors had 5-6 thousand views and literally on the last day it grew to 15 thousand. NASA also wrote in a letter that they analyzed traffic on Facebook, and ours was the highest,” Butkalyuk said.

Now the team, which consists of the 7 man, plans to make two prototypes of his invention - for ground and stratospheric tests. The developers have voiced their intentions to NASA representatives and are waiting for their reaction.

In addition, the winners of the competition are preparing for a trip to Cape Canaveral to launch a rocket in September.

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