The six-member team, known as Star Maker, traveled to Houston in July to pitch at NASA’s first-ever ORBIT Challenge, a student competition designed to crowdsource fresh ideas for the agency’s exploration goals. The competition drew hundreds of university entries nationwide, from which 20 teams were selected as finalists across two tracks. Star Maker competed in the Space Track and walked away with a $15,000 prize for its Orbital Solar Energy Harvesting Swarm, or OSEHS, a constellation of autonomous satellites that would collect solar energy in space and relay it to receivers on the lunar surface using microwave beams. The concept deliberately moves the power source off the Moon entirely, sidestepping the two-week darkness problem that makes surface solar power untenable at the pole.

Tatiana Mejia, an NJIT mechanical engineering student in the class of 2027 who conceived the project, argues that the idea sounds more futuristic than it actually is. In her view, the individual pieces of the system already exist in some form, and the real challenge lies in pushing them forward and integrating them at scale. She points to swarm robotics as the key enabling technology, noting that a distributed swarm can complete its mission even when individual units fail. In the space environment, she emphasizes, that kind of resilience is not a luxury but a requirement, because a single fault can endanger everyone involved. It is a philosophy she knows well: Mejia previously developed a swarm robotics concept that earned a $10,000 NASA grant, and she had spent three years working in NJIT’s Swissler Innovative Robotics Lab before the lunar power idea began taking shape in fall 2025.

The team assembled organically around that seed of an idea. Mejia began working with fellow NJIT mechanical engineering student Natalie Kiwanian and Jennifer Salto, a mechanical engineering student at Stevens Institute of Technology, after Salto discovered the newly announced ORBIT Challenge. The trio then recruited specialists to fill the technical gaps. Kevin Gutama, an NJIT electrical engineering alumnus now working at GE Aerospace, took on power distribution. KesUranNu Baylor, an NJIT physics student with orbital mechanics experience from a NASA Goddard internship, handled the trajectories. Andrea Yanez Soto, also from NJIT, modeled how the swarm would communicate. The result was an unusually complete undergraduate team, pairing mechanical, electrical and physics expertise with hands-on robotics experience.

Their proposed architecture is ambitious in scale. The team envisions a network of roughly 1,100 autonomous satellites, each about six feet wide, operating in an agile formation. Some units would orbit closer to the Sun, harvesting sunlight where the solar flux is far more intense than in Earth’s neighborhood, while others would relay that collected energy inward, beaming it by microwave to receivers on the lunar surface to provide continuous power regardless of the Moon’s day-night cycle. The physics behind the choice of location is straightforward: capturing even a tiny fraction of the Sun’s raw output dwarfs humanity’s entire energy consumption. As Mejia puts it, harnessing just 0.01 percent of the Sun’s raw power would exceed current global energy demands by a factor of roughly two billion.

Crucially, the team did not stop at concept sketches. They built simulations and physical prototypes to demonstrate that their swarm could survive the harsh realities of deep space operations. In one simulation, 12 units orbiting the Sun in a formation the team describes as a pearl necklace showed how the constellation could recover from individual satellite failures without any intervention from Earth, redistributing tasks among the surviving units. Gutama notes that much of this work went beyond what NASA actually required of entrants. The simulation, the prototypes and the elaborate presentation display were all self-imposed efforts, driven by the team’s desire to show that they could genuinely compete and that their vision was technically grounded rather than merely aspirational.

The run-up to the competition tested the team’s endurance as much as its engineering. The day before their flight to Houston, members were at NJIT past midnight applying final touches to their materials, and Kiwanian recalls going almost two days without sleep. Once at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the finalists spent a week touring the facilities and meeting space scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs before presentation day arrived. At the Pitch Showcase on the final day, each team had 15 minutes to present everything they had built since February. Kiwanian remembers Baylor explaining how the swarm could use the gravity of Venus to bring the constellation closer to the Sun, a gravitational assist maneuver of the kind mission designers have used for decades to reshape spacecraft orbits without expending propellant. Midway through the explanation, she noticed the chief scientist of the International Space Station Program nodding along, a moment she took as a very good sign.

For Baylor, the experience was as much about personal and intellectual growth as it was about the prize. He describes how his applied understanding of everything he had learned at NJIT, particularly how physical bodies move in space, accelerated dramatically through the project, and how bringing the work to NASA and discussing it with the people there made him feel he had truly grown as a physicist. That sense of validation extended to the judging panel itself. Mejia recalls that the judges, who ranged from JPMorgan representatives to NASA engineers, encouraged the team not to treat OSEHS as just a paper concept for the agency but to actually make it happen after the competition. That advice appears to have landed.

Back from Houston, the six members split the $15,000 prize evenly, $2,500 apiece, but the project is far from over. Star Maker intends to turn OSEHS into a startup venture, and interestingly, the team’s first market may not be the Moon at all. Kiwanian suggests the technology could help data center developers power new sites by reducing their burden on the electrical grid, addressing the enormous and rapidly growing energy appetite of generative artificial intelligence. The team is applying to the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program for customer discovery training and has set its sights on NASA TechLeap, a prize program that could provide up to $500,000 to build and test actual hardware. Mejia says the ORBIT Challenge made the idea real for the team, and the next step is raising money to create a prototype and launch the startup.

Behind the technical ambition lies a broader motivation that the team returns to repeatedly. For Mejia, space exploration has always been about looking at the big picture, not continents and not skin color, but bringing humanity together. She argues that if humanity wants to avoid exhausting Earth’s resources, collaboration as one species is essential, and that conviction is what continues to inspire the team’s work together. Whether OSEHS satellites eventually beam power across cislunar space or first help terrestrial data centers lighten their load on the grid, the Star Maker team has demonstrated something that competitions like the ORBIT Challenge were designed to find: a bold idea, validated by simulation and prototype, carried forward by students determined to see it through from concept to hardware.

Subject of Research: A student-designed orbital solar energy harvesting satellite swarm for supplying continuous microwave-beamed power to a lunar base

Article Title: NJIT students’ plan to power the moon with swarm robots wins NASA prize

Article References: NJIT students’ plan to power the moon with swarm robots wins NASA prize. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: NASA ORBIT Challenge, lunar South Pole, space solar power, swarm robotics, microwave power beaming, NJIT, satellite constellation, orbital mechanics, lunar base power, OSEHS, NASA TechLeap, student aerospace competition

The technology at the heart of the study is the Vertical Solar Array Technology, or VSAT, a concept NASA has been advancing for lunar polar missions. Unlike conventional flat panels, a VSAT features an elevated, vertically oriented photovoltaic panel that rotates to always face the Sun. This design is ideally suited to the lunar poles, where the Sun never rises high into the sky. Because the Sun skims just a few degrees above the horizon, a vertical rotating panel can receive sunlight at nearly normal incidence, maximizing the solar energy it captures. A single large VSAT measuring roughly fifty square meters, with a solar conversion efficiency of thirty percent, can produce about fifteen kilowatts of power in full sunlight. That is impressive for one unit, but early lunar activities will quickly outgrow such bespoke power sources, so the real challenge is combining hundreds of panels into a farm capable of generating power in the megawatt range.

That is where the geometry turns hostile. The same low Sun angle that makes vertical panels so effective at the poles also creates a serious problem: shadows. Because the Sun sits near the horizon, every VSAT casts an enormous shadow directly behind it, and a dense field of panels can shade one another severely, slashing the total energy output. On a hillside where the terrain itself can also block the Sun, self-shading between panels becomes a critical design constraint. Previous studies, including work by Ross and colleagues, had shown that lunar polar hills offer near-constant solar visibility but suffer abrupt shading from nearby structures, and that a megawatt farm would require hundreds of panels whose interactions had to be modeled carefully.

Earlier illumination studies of the lunar poles, such as those by Noda, Speyerer, Gläser, Mazarico and their colleagues, modeled the local horizon as a slowly changing elevation function around a site. These approaches revealed that a ridgeline on the Connecting Ridge beside Shackleton Crater could receive over eighty percent illumination across an eighteen-year precessional cycle. But they were not designed to handle the abrupt, discrete shadows cast by neighboring solar panels, and they were computationally far too expensive to evaluate the thousands of possible panel arrangements needed to optimize a farm of hundreds of units.

The new study introduces two novel ideas to break that computational bottleneck. The first is a binary sky bitmask technique, borrowed from terrestrial solar energy estimation. On Earth, sky imagers use bitmasks to capture clouds and scattered light, which vary continuously in brightness. The airless Moon is far simpler: sunlight is either blocked or not. The researchers built their terrain model from a cascade of digital elevation models, including a high-resolution five-meter DEM for the Connecting Ridge and coarser regional models from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter. For each candidate panel location, the narrow corridor of sky within a few degrees of the horizon where the Sun can appear is mapped onto a rectangular bitmask with an angular grid resolution of 0.05 degrees, fine enough that the solar disk spans ten pixels and eighty active bits. Computing the insolation at any moment then reduces to a fast bitwise AND operation between the sun bitmask and the sky bitmask, with bits packed into sixteen-bit integers for speed. The team validated the method by comparing it against a traditional ray-tracing calculation, finding the two power curves for a hundred-panel farm almost perfectly overlapped, and by checking their terrain registration against actual photographs from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

With the fast computation in hand, the researchers turned to the design problem. They considered a grid of 6,166 candidate VSAT locations spaced twenty meters apart above the 1,900-meter elevation contour on the Connecting Ridge. Each panel was modeled as five meters wide and ten meters tall, with its bottom edge five meters above the surface, delivering up to fifteen kilowatts in full sun. A greedy optimization algorithm then built the farm panel by panel: at each step, the candidate location that added the most total energy to the farm, after accounting for the shading it cast on all previously placed panels and received from them, was permanently selected. Starting from the single best-lit spot on the ridge, the algorithm generated an ordered sequence of panel positions.

The first hundred panels in the energy-maximizing configuration produced a total of 10,695 megawatt-hours during the year 2030, an average of 1.22 megawatts, comfortably above NASA’s one-megawatt requirement. But the design had a hidden flaw. Twice per lunar day, the Sun’s direction aligned with the long diagonal of the panel layout, and most panels shaded one another simultaneously, causing dramatic dips in output known as brownouts. The energy-optimized arrangement had naturally exploited alignments that concentrated shading at times when other panels were already well lit, but these transient power troughs posed a real problem for a grid that must supply life-support systems without interruption.

The second novel idea addressed the brownouts directly. Instead of maximizing total integrated energy, the researchers optimized a logarithmic value function that rewards marginal power most when the farm is generating little of it. In effect, an extra kilowatt is worth far more during a power trough than during peak production, so the algorithm steers panel placement toward times and places that fill in the gaps. Empirically, the result proved insensitive to the scaling constant chosen for the value function. The reoptimized hundred-panel farm lost only two percent of its total annual output, delivering 10,522 megawatt-hours or an average of roughly 1.2 megawatts, yet the brownout troughs vanished entirely, leaving only the unavoidable blackouts that occur when the entire hill is plunged into darkness by the shadow of Mons Mouton during part of the year.

Those terrain-driven blackouts are the one problem no arrangement of solar panels can solve, and the study is explicit about the implication: survival power during dark periods must come from stored energy or a nuclear source. The researchers also quantified the diminishing returns of farm expansion. While the first panel contributes an average of 13.7 kilowatts, the hundredth adds only 10.8 kilowatts, a 21 percent reduction, and the five-hundredth adds just 7.7 kilowatts, down 44 percent, as self-shading and less favorable sites take their toll. Even so, the Connecting Ridge could sustain an average of 4.8 megawatts with five hundred panels, and the analysis indicates the chosen boundary comfortably accommodated the first five hundred placements, though larger farms would need more space. The economics of panel deployment versus marginal benefit will ultimately determine the optimal size of such an installation.

The study opens several avenues for future work. Real deployments will face slope constraints and other siting restrictions, which can be incorporated by simply removing candidate locations from the grid. More intriguingly, the authors suggest that if individual VSAT panels could move by meters over hours, coordinated motion could further suppress self-shading, a far harder optimization problem that might one day be tamed by deep learning or autonomous distributed computation, or even solved by a simple emergent behavior at each station. For now, the work provides a practical blueprint: by combining a fast bitmask illumination model with value-based optimization, lunar planners can design solar farms that grow gracefully from a handful of panels into a megawatt-class power grid, bringing permanent human habitation at the Moon’s south pole a significant step closer to reality.

The bitmask approach also carries practical implications for how lunar power infrastructure might be planned and expanded over time. Because pre-existing installations can simply be added to the initial sky bitmask at every candidate location, the method naturally accommodates incremental growth: a farm that begins with a handful of bespoke panels can be extended later without redesigning the whole site. This aligns with the staged reality of lunar exploration, in which early missions arrive with modest power needs and only later demand megawatt-scale generation as surface activity intensifies.

The study site itself was chosen for good reason. The Connecting Ridge, on the rim of Shackleton Crater near the south pole, is considered a strong candidate for high-activity landing zones, partly because the hypothesized presence of water ice and other frozen volatiles in permanently shadowed regions nearby makes the area attractive for resource utilization. The Sun’s path there is confined to a narrow swath only a few degrees above the horizon, shifting between solstice extremes and bounded by a margin of about two degrees to ensure no part of the solar disk escapes the modeled corridor from any vantage point in the study area.

There is also a strategic dimension to the work. By estimating how much power a single, well-chosen lunar hill can deliver before self-shading becomes excessive, the analysis offers long-term guidance on the eventual mix of solar and nuclear power that sustained lunar presence will require. If the best hilltops can supply several megawatts but no more, planners can determine at what point stored energy or fission systems must take over, informing architecture decisions years before hardware is deployed.

Subject of Research: Design optimization of a megawatt-scale vertical solar array farm for power generation at the lunar south pole

Article Title: Design optimization of a megawatt scale lunar VSAT solar array farm

Article References: Butler, W. H., & Freudenreich, Y. P. (2026). Design optimization of a megawatt scale lunar VSAT solar array farm. Space and Planetary Resources, 2(1), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44461-026-00009-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44461-026-00009-8

Keywords: lunar south pole, VSAT, solar array farm, self-shading, sky bitmask, illumination modeling, Shackleton Crater, Connecting Ridge, lunar power systems, photovoltaics, space exploration, megawatt power