Friday, April 11, 2008

Multiple Student Space Prizes

There's lots going on in the student space prize world:

The blog of the 8th Continent Project has a multi-post report on the Lunar Ventures Competition from someone who was there. Out of an expected 3 parts, parts one and two are currently available as of this posting.

Universe Today posts about several student space activities. In keeping with the theme of this blog, I'll concentrate on the ones that are competitions, although the others aren't drastically different in other respects.

One student competition that's described is the Move an Asteroid competition we just heard about from RLV News.

Another is the Cassini Scientist for a Day essay contest, where the winner gets to control Cassini's cameras for a hour.

Another is the LIMA Challenge, where students get to propose research efforts based on the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica.

Cosmic Log has an article that covers, in great detail, the Cassini contest and one of the other activities also covered in the Universe Today post that I didn't describe.

In some recent posts, the Oregon Space Grant Consortium also describes some student competitions: the Young Scientist Challenge (this year the theme of the video challenge is "the science of space" with finals at NASA GSFC), a deadline update (April 30) for the NASA Aeronautics Competition for College Students, four non-space competitions that nevertheless promote skills like marketing and resourcefulness we'll need to get fully into space, and the Cassini contest I described earlier.

Meanwhile, Hometown Life tells us the story of one of this year's Team America Rocketry Challenge teams. Also, the TARC Blog has an entry on another team - one that's back for the 3rd year. The rules are different this year (2 eggs, different altitude), so they need to adjust to that.

Here's a YouTube collection from a TARC team that ends up with a very good time and altitude in one of their tests.