A team from Wrocław Tech won the international Mars rover competition held in Ankara. Students from Project Scorpio proved to be the best in the Anatolian Rover Challenge for the third year in a row.

This year's competition proved exceptionally difficult for the Scorpio Infinity rover team, as it did for the other teams that flew to Turkey. Most of the teams experienced health problems, probably due to a virus that a sizable number of players caught.

- Out of our twelve, as many as nine felt ill at some stage of the competition. So we had to operate in a severely limited lineup. The fact that we achieved such a good result shows that as a team we are really in tune, able to complement each other and communicate very well, as well as to take over someone else's tasks and carry them out at a very good level,” stressed Zofia Stypułkowska, president of the Off-Road Scientific Circle (which is responsible for developing Project Scorpio).

Sixteen teams from Turkey, India, Bangladesh and Poland qualified for the competition (in addition to the representation of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology, also teams from the Rzeszow and Warsaw Universities of Technology), of which nine eventually approached the mission.

Their rovers had to complete a number of demanding tasks - simulating missions on the Martian surface - including collecting samples, conducting research, carrying tools, taking pictures and conducting failure diagnostics.

One of the missions took place at night - in it, the rovers had to turn on the “fuel cell” and take some specific pictures, including of the rocket, meanwhile, for example, traversing an underground tunnel. The team had only 15 minutes to do all this. Thus, a small malfunction was enough to lose a lot of points.

- The key here was good, fast teamwork and sufficiently strong lighting to be able to perform tasks efficiently despite the night conditions,” Sophie points out.

In this mission, the team from Wrocław scored the most points.

In the end students from Wrocław University of Science and Technology, won the entire competition with a 40-point lead over the second team - MIST Mongol Barota from Bangladesh. This was the third consecutive win in this competition for our national team.

Scorpio also boasts an award in the Science category for conducting research on a “Martian” sample.