Sewanhaka students excel in NASA challenge

Sewanhaka school district’s Career and Technical Education pre-engineering program students have been selected as one of 60 winning teams in the NASA TechRise Student Challenge. It is Sewanhaka’s third consecutive year being recognized as winners in this nationwide contest, which is administered by Future Engineers.

The students were challenged to develop a science or technology experiment idea for either of the NASA TechRise flight vehicles: a high-altitude balloon or rocket-powered lander.

This year, Sewanhaka’s team worked on ideas for the rocket-powered lander. They brainstormed experiment ideas, planned the design and then submitted a proposal for review. Their project is titled, “Landing Attitude and Spectrographic Analysis for Ground Navigation and Asteroid Exploration (LASAGNA-E).”

Each winning team receives $1,500 to build their experiments, a flight box in which to build it, an assigned spot to test their experiment on a NASA-sponsored flight in summer 2024 and technical support during the experiment build phase from Future Engineers advisors.

Winning teams were selected based on meeting the judging criteria. For the rocket-powered lander, the experiments were judged based upon the experiment’s impact on education and/or society, feasibility to build in approximately four months with the provided budget, originality and clarity of design plan.