NASA contest: Teens script a space odyssey

BENGALURU: In the not-so-distant future, tens of thousands of humans may be transported to outer space on artificial habitats that support life.
Much as it seems like a plot from science fiction, school students from Bengaluru have bagged top honours for their space settlement designs in a global competition hosted by US space agency Nasa.

Eighth graders from Sri Chaitanya Techno School (Ramamurthy Nagar), seventh g r a d e r s f r o m N a r aya n a Olympiad School (Whitefield) and Sri Chaitanya Techno School (JP Nagar) secured the first place in the Nasa Ames Space Settlement Contest 2016, an annual event open for 6-12th grade students.

The contest's mandate was to design virtual space colonies in which settlers live inside a gigantic, air-tight spacecraft.

Punith Sai Arani's team at Sri Chaitanya Techno School in Ramamurthy Nagar worked for nine months to come up a space colony called Invictus-E, which won the first place in the Grade-8 category . “It's a small, but efficient design that can accommodate 20,000 people. Our colony will be placed in an orbit close to the Earth and Moon as the latter can fetch resources like helium,“ Punith said.

Nidhi Mayurika, a Class-7 student at Narayana Olympiad School, created Saikatam, a three-layered space colony that took her six months to design. “Initially, my colony can hold 4,000 humans and 1,000 domestic animals and will be located on the L5 Earth-Moon orbit that is approximately 3.85 lakh km away ,“ said Nidhi, who has completed an astrobiology course from the University of Edinburgh through online education platform Coursera.

A team of nine students from Sri Chaitanya Techno School in JP Nagar also came first in the Grade-7 category for Indraprasth, a modular structure that will orbit around the Earth with 10,000 people onboard. “We started out with minimum knowledge about space travel. Most of us want to pursue astrophysics and see how Indraprasth can be turned into reality,“ team member Koushik Ramesh said.

This annual contest, co-operated by Nasa Ames Research Center, San Jose State University and the National Space Society , is for students up to 12th grade (18 years-old) from anywhere in the world.

These students now stand a chance to attend the NSS 35th International Space Development Conference in Puerto Rico, United States, in May.