Loudoun middle schooler wins national NASA engineering contest
Darn kids and their hippy be-bop! Why, when I was their age, we had to....
What? This is something good?
Never mind.
Loudoun middle schooler wins national NASA engineering contest
Thursday, Jul. 7, 2016 by Hannah Dellinger, Times-Mirror Staff Writer
Ashburn middle schooler Nagasai Sreyash Sola shows off a prototype he created and built himself.
Photo courtesy/Hari Sola
Eagle Ridge Middle School student Nagasai Sreyash Sola recently won first place in a national engineering contest to design a way to grow fresh food for astronauts on Mars.
Sola won the junior division of the Future Engineers Star Trek Replicator Challenge, organized by NASA, Star Trek & the ASME Foundation, on July 5. Students were asked to think about future long-duration space missions and to design 3-D printable objects that will help astronauts eat nutritious meals in the year 2050. As part of the challenge, Sola was interviewed by a panel of experts, including NASA astronaut Charlie Camarda. ... The rising Ashburn seventh-grader designed an "Astro Martian Mini Farm" for the challenge.
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Sola will receive a compact 3-D printer for his school and a grand prize trip to New York to join former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino for a private viewing of the Space Shuttle Enterprise at the Intrepid Sea, Air, & Space Museum. He will also get to take a tour of MakerBots headquarters in Brooklyn.
On top of his most recent accomplishment, Sola also presented a tool he created to help blind people navigate using touch-based distance sensing at the National Maker Fair in D.C. last month. He is currently looking for a way to get the device to as many people in need as possible.