College students nationwide are invited to participate in NASA’s fourth annual systems engineering paper competition, where awards include cash scholarships and VIP invitations to attend future space shuttle or rocket launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.NASA’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate is inviting teams of undergraduate and graduate students throughout the country to submit a paper on an exploration systems mission topic. The deadline to register for the competition is April 16, and papers are due April 23. The winning teams will be announced in May.
Last year, Team Hokie of Virginia Tech and Team Taurus of Rice University shared the top prize with their papers titled “CANSAT: Design of a Small Autonomous Sounding Rocket Payload” and “Bone Remodeling Monitor.”
Team Hokie designed a small research rocket payload that could be launched to 900 meters and deployed would autonomously navigate to a predefined landing coordinate. Team Taurus, a group of five senior bioengineering students, designed a device to help astronauts keep their skeletons strong and healthy by measuring bone mineral density loss.
