Yesterday afternoon, NASA announced the winners of the second NASA TechRise Student Challenge, and both Hopkinton Middle School and Fay School students were selected as two of three winning schools in Massachusetts. 

The challenge, in its second year, is a national STEM competition for 6th to 12th graders that offers students invaluable hands-on STEM experience and the opportunity to test their own innovative solutions for space exploration and the study of Earth. Administered by Future Engineers, it is designed to attract, engage, and prepare future science, technology, engineering, and mathematics professionals.    

This year, the challenge was to design a science or technology experiment that could be tested on a NASA-sponsored high-altitude balloon flight. High-altitude balloon platforms have catalyzed fundamental discoveries for decades that contribute to our current understanding of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe. The students will work through the remainder of the school year building out their experiment, with the support of professional engineers, in preparation for the flight test which will occur this summer.

• Hopkinton Middle School’s experiment was called: Corrosion of Metal in Outer Space. Fay School students named theirs: Measuring temperature, pressure and humidity

There were 60 winning teams from across the country. Each team will receive $1,500 to build out their experiments, a flight box in which to build it, technical support from Future Engineers, and an assigned spot on the high-altitude balloon flight. Winning proposals included experiments that explore everything from space travel to botany to exoplanets.