Credits and reuse

This edition was prepared by the Robotics Club at Mississippi State University for its own team and for other university teams preparing for the University Rover Challenge. The analysis is independent. It is not published by The Mars Society or by any team whose work it describes.

The competition and the teams

The University Rover Challenge is run by The Mars Society at the Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah, and the 2027 finals run from 2 to 5 June 2027 S-URC-LOGISTICS S-URC27-RULES §1.a.i. The rulebook, the Q&A page and the official score sheets are the primary documents behind the rules and results pages, and the copies used for this edition are kept on the primary documents page.

The team profiles rest on material published by the teams themselves: their sites, code, papers, review films and social channels. Every profile names the team and links to its sources. The teams own their words, images and videos, and a reader who wants to reuse a team photograph should go to the team’s own page rather than to this book.

Images and documents

Every image and document in the book has a credit line and a link to its original where one exists. The credit names the author or team and the year. Where a licence is known it is shown, for example a Creative Commons licence or a manufacturer’s product-image terms. Where no licence is stated, the credit names the source and the book makes no licence claim.

Every figure also carries a full-resolution link, and the credit line is generated from the same record that the asset index uses. That index lists all 307 media files with author, year, description, licence and source, and the gallery shows the same set.

Charts and diagrams made for this book are original analysis. They may be reused with attribution to the Robotics Club at Mississippi State University, and each chart is drawn from the tables that the analysis pages describe, so a value can be checked before it is quoted.

Text and data

The original text, the charts and the data tables may be reused with attribution. A suitable form is:

Robotics Club at Mississippi State University, URC 2027: Engineering Design Analysis, 2026.

Quotations from rules, team documents or publications remain the property of their owners and should be attributed to the original source. Source identifiers such as S-URC27-RULES are part of the citation system and should be kept when a table or passage is reused, because they are what makes a value traceable.

The CSV files may be reused under the same attribution. They are extracted data rather than an official record, and the official score sheets remain the authority for a result.

The people behind the book

The book was written and assembled by the Robotics Club at Mississippi State University. It draws on the work of the teams named in the profiles, the judges and staff of The Mars Society, and the public documentation of component manufacturers. Their work is the evidence; the analysis is the club’s.

Where a recommendation appears, it is the club’s judgement from the evidence. It is not a rule and it is not a team’s endorsement, and where the evidence is thin the page says so. A choice that worked for a top team is described as that team’s choice, not as a requirement for anyone else.

The print edition

The print edition is the same text in a fixed A4 layout, with the cover, the contents, the eleven parts and the appendices. It is available on the downloads page, which also carries the data tables and the archived documents.

Corrections

A correction should name the page, the claim, the source and the replacement value. The test is the same one the book applies to itself: a number needs an owner, a sample and a date. Where a credit is wrong, the correction should name the asset, the current credit and the correct one, and the same standard applies to a request to remove material.