Car Showings: 

This summer has provided several opportunities for the Solar Car to catch some rays.

Rolla Summerfest

Soon after the spring semester ended the Solar Miner VI was back on the road.  In the first week of June we were able to reach out to the community and allow them to see what it really takes to build a solar car.  In this picture is Clinton Guenther and Christina Jung talk with the crowd about the past, present and future of the solar car.

Kansas City Student Send-Off Party

This July we traveled to Lee's Summit help show our support for the students of Missouri S&T as well as our great Alumni Association.  Here you can see the displays set up and a few members preparing for the event to start.

Summer Aerospace Camp

The last 2 weeks of July we were invited to show the car to several groups of inquisitive campers as well as provide solar panels for other activities.  The groups were given the opportunity to see a solar car up close, ask questions and even pretend to drive it.

Solar Miner VII: 

Despite the summer months, work on Solar Miner VII still continues.  So far we have several body designs to work with thanks to Andrew Sourk.  SM VII will be powered by Sunpower A300 cells and will be using batteries to be donated by Kokam America to store the power.

A special thanks to Sourk and Kokam for their contributions.  

Today the North American Solar Challenge released an initial version of the regulations for the upcoming 2010.

http://americansolarchallenge.org/event/nasc2010/tech/NASC2010Regs20090505.pdf

As these are an initial revision, questions and comments are encouraged by NASC.

As part of Missouri S&T's annual Earth Day celebrations, we had Solar Miner VI out in front of the Havener Center and let the kids get in it. We also had two students, Adam Lewis and Cody Massar, showing off an older car at the Missouri Energy Summit in Columbia.

On Friday Cody Massar and Daniel Welty, along with two members from the Solar House Team, Luke Sudkamp and Cory Brennan, and Dr. Hirtz, the Interim Director of the Center, presented during the lunch for the University's Engineering Advisory Board.  We discussed how both teams work to improve systems related to renewable energy problems. Covering production, storage, use, and optimization, the presentation went very well. Some of the members attending included high ranking officers of both the University and well know corporations.

The whole University of Missouri system has recently become very focused on becoming "Green," especially here at Missouri S&T. The E3 program is the result of this. We of course are happy to see the name recycled from our second car, E-Cubed, that raced in 1995. It was our last attempt at a composite chassis, and was destroyed unceremoniously after its competition. As our heaviest car, we decided to never use that much epoxy again. Consequently Solar Miner weighed half as much.

As part of this, we will be attending the Energy Summit at Mizzou on April 22^nd and 23^rd. More information about that can be found here.

P.S. I like our logo better.

It took some time to get the totals, but here they are.  Tuesday night brought in $760 in pledges.  This brings the final total to $17,318.  We thank you all for helping us have a successful phonathon this year.

To start off the second and last week of Phonathon this year, the night's total donations were $535. This brings the total to $16,558. In case you were wondering, we did not call last night because of the Super Bowl.

Last night $2,025 of pledges came in through Phonathon. That is our lowest single night total so far this year, but we also had fewer people calling due to sickness. The four night running total is up to $15,573. Again, we thank you for your support of our team.

While the snow came down heavy outside, we had another good night for getting pledges.  The total for Tuesday was $5,040.  This brings the three day running total to $13,548, which is over halfway to our goal.  We appreciate your donations.