Red Mountain students win NASA competition

Apr. 12—For the second consecutive year, NASA crowned a group of Mesa students from Red Mountain High School winners of the TechRise STEM competition.

The TechRise Student Challenge is a nationwide competition that tasks 6th-12th grade students with designing an experiment to fly in either a high-altitude balloon or a rocket-powered lander.

The competition aims to foster exploration of the intersection between science, technology, and space.

During this past semester, under the guidance of Red Mountain STEM Department Chair Adam Middleton, a group of juniors worked together to formulate their rocket-powered lander experiment.

Rocket-powered landers are test vehicles meant to imitate moon or other planetary landings. These vehicles help engineers visualize planet terrain types and obstacles by capturing aerial images and videos.

The students spent hours during and after class drafting their proposal and sketching designs.

The experiment must fit in a 4"x4"x8" flight box that will be placed within the rocket-powered lander and shot 80 feet into the air during a test flight.

The group's winning experiment, "Lunar Depth Aerospace Rocket," is inspired by rainforest mapping technology and uses a GPS, microprocessor, and lidar.

"We have a GPS that relates to our microprocessor. This is on the rocket and tells the latitude and longitude," said team member Lucas Florcke.

"We have a rangefinder that tells us the altitude. It can indicate where we are based on our position," added Florcke.

"We also have a lidar that tells us the distance between the rocket and the ground. By traveling along a path in the sky, our rocket will map out the topography of the ground beneath it," added team member Brody Herrick.

NASA's Flight Opportunities program evaluated students using four criteria: the originality of the flight experiment, clarity of the experiment design plan, feasibility of the experiment, and the experiment's impact on education and society.

Judges selected Red Mountain and 59 other groups to work under the mentorship of professional engineers to build prototypes of their flight vehicles.

NASA also awarded winning teams a $1,500 grant to purchase necessary building materials.

"During the initial stages, we worked amongst ourselves and with our teacher to generate ideas, but now we are working with NASA mentors who are guiding us," said Florcke.

"The mentors are teaching us how to execute the project and providing us with technical knowledge and skills," Florcke added.

By participating in TechRise, the high schoolers have taken their STEM comprehension to new heights.

"We have learned how to solder components and about coding so we can control and get feedback from our microprocessor as it travels," said Herrick. "We also learned technical writing from writing the proposal."

Florcke added, "We gained electrical and mechanical skills by learning how new data components fit together."

Middleton recounted the growth he has seen in his students because of their dedication to the competition.

"All of the work they are doing is so much higher level than what you are used to seeing in a traditional high school classroom," said Middleton. "It is really rewarding as a teacher to see how engaged they are and the quality of work they are producing."

This summer, NASA engineers will test the viability of the student experiments. During a two-minute flight test, the experiments will be placed on rocket-powered landers and maneuvered through a 100-meter x 100-meter course in Mojave, California.

After the test flight, the competition coordinators will send the students back their box and a copy of the digital data collected during the flight.

Using these materials, students can review their project and compare their hypotheses to their results.