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Madison Junior High wins NASA competition, prepars experiment to go on next launch

REXBURG, Idaho (KIFI) - Science students at Madison Junior High are going above and beyond. A recent academic competition provided by NASA titled the TechRise challenge involved nearly 600 different schools across the nation. Eight graders at Madison Junior High were one of the 57 different teams who won.

The TechRise competition is part of NASA's plans to "educate and inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a recent press release on the competition.

Eigth grade science teacher Neva Telford says she found out about the competition through an email over the summer.

"I believe I received an email over the summer that it basically invites science teachers to go ahead and get involved in different," Telford said. "We get all kinds of emails, but this one came and said, Hey, if you think your students would be interested in completing a science proposal, a project that could get selected to go."

Telford says she showed an informational video to all of her classes, and the 13 member team started to form.

"Out of about 110 students, I had 34 students who sent emails that said, 'Yeah, I want to do this.' And when we finally had our first meeting, we had about 15 students show up and then these were the 13 that continued to work on through the process."

Thomas Sessions, one of the eight graders on the team, says they came up with their experiment while thinking about possibly futures.

"So like, we're going to go to the Moon anyways, it's not if we're going to do it, we already have all the technology to do it," Sessions said. "We just need to build it all and everything. So we just thought we about medicine. What is it going to be sent down there? So are we just going to send medicine and stuff like that? So that's where the idea came from."

The team's project they have titled "Gateway Shipping" is hoping to find a way to ship medicine in a small container into a micro gravity environment.

For Jacob Palafox, the competition is one step closer to realizing his dream of working for NASA.

"It's always been a dream of mine since I was a little kid to work for NASA just to do stuff like this," Palafox said. "And now that I'm doing this, I'm hopefully one step closer to that dream."

The team behind "Gateway Shipping" received $1,500 to build their experiment and test it to the best of their abilities. They also received access to the different materials that they need to get the experiment ready to send to NASA this June. The team also will have access to Flight simulator software and support from mentors at NASA.

Telford and her students have till June to get the project together to the best of their abilities. It will then go on NASA's next launch which according to the press release announcing the winners is "targeted to take place in early 2023."

Article Topic Follows: Education

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Braydon Wilson

Braydon is a reporter for Local News 8.

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