NASA Selects Winning Team In Balloonsat Competition
CLEVELAND -- NASA has selected the winner of the national Balloonsat
High Altitude Flight Competition, a contest that introduces high
school students to engineering principles and encourages engineering
practices.
The high school team from North Carolina School of Science and
Mathematics in Durham, N.C., took home the top prize.
The winning team's experiment, "Variations in Polyvinyl Alcohol
Radiation Shields," was one of four student team experiments launched
May 26 on a NASA weather balloon to the near-space environment of the
stratosphere, an altitude of about 100,000 feet. The experiment
demonstrated radiation shielding with homegrown polyvinyl alcohol
films through a combination of ground tests and a flight experiment.
"We were impressed by the work of all the teams, but especially this
one," said David Snyder, technical lead for the Balloonsat project at
NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. "This team won because
they combined a variety of techniques and information sources to look
for radiation effects."
NASA will present a medallion to members of the winning team, and the
high school will receive a plaque this fall. The student teams were
judged on teamwork, presentations at Glenn's May 27 Balloonsat
Symposium, and a final report submitted after the experiments were
launched on the weather balloon.
Other teams which had experiments launched were: Charlottesville High
School in Charlottesville, Va.; Upper St. Clair High School in Upper
St. Clair, Pa.; and Stansbury High School in Stansbury, Utah.
The Balloonsat competition and similar education programs help NASA
attract and retain students in math, science, technology and
engineering disciplines critical to the agency's future missions.
Balloonsat is sponsored by the Educational Programs Office at Glenn,
the Ohio Space Grant Consortium, and Teaching from Space, a program
of the Education Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
For further information on this competition, visit:
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/
For more information about NASA's education programs, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/education
Source: NASA
