On a nice weekend in February, Concordia College students traveled to Minneapolis to show off the self-cleaning solar panels they had built for the Minnesota Space Grant Consortium challenge. Held annually, the challenge offers students the opportunity to practice their teamwork skills, participate in friendly competition, and apply their physics knowledge.
The Minnesota Space Grant Consortium is an organization based out of the University of Minnesota that provides opportunities for colleges around the state to participate in aerospace activities.
Although participation is mostly geared toward students in the physics program, any student studying the sciences can join. Many computer science majors like to participate so they can work on their coding skills.
Last year’s challenge was to come up with a ballooning system made up of a box with sensors to be sent up to space along with a weather balloon. Johan Dominguez Lopez’s team created a ballooning system with a camera so they could record all the way up in the stratosphere.
Lopez has always had an interest in robotics and circuitry. At Concordia, he’s had several avenues to explore that interest further.
“I’ve had the opportunity to actually apply what I’m learning in my classes. I’m not just sitting in a room listening to a lecture, I get to use it and I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time,” he said. “I’m developing different skills too, like socializing and how to admit when I don’t know something.”
Over the summer after his first year, Lopez worked with a professional development program at the L’Space Academy. During this internship, he learned how to design a project and send it to space.
Coupled with the two years he has participated in the MnSG challenge, Lopez has had a lot of hands-on experience.
This year’s challenge was to come up with a self-cleaning solar panel station. Given the intense swings of Minnesota weather, MnSG wanted a solution that would eliminate the need for someone to be constantly maintaining the solar panels.
Two Concordia teams created their own unique device to self-clean the solar panel.
Dominguez Lopez, an applied physics major at Concordia, was a part of Team B. He said the main goal of the challenge was to be as creative as possible when coming up with a solution.
“My team made a conveyor belt system that rotated itself every 15 minutes. (The judges) said that it was the most creative idea that they saw come through the challenge,” Lopez said.
Eli Heyer, a physics major at Concordia, was on the second team representing the college.
His team started the brainstorming process by watching YouTube videos of solar panels already in Minnesota to see how others might have resolved the challenge MnSG proposed. After some research, the team decided to create an automatic scraping mechanism, similar to an ice scraper for a car’s windshield.
“This year I had a lot more fun with the challenge because we had strong leadership. It was vital to our success; everyone had their own tasks, but we still had someone in charge to look to,” Heyer said.
Heyer contributed his coding skills to the design while other team members focused on 3-D printing materials for the solar panel.
“Both teams this year pushed hard to get things finished before the showcase. I thought that this reflected on us as a campus — being able to show what our physics department is able to accomplish,” he said.
Written by Alyssa Czernek '25