A student team from Clark Magnet High School in La Crescenta joined the list of winning teams from 57 schools around the country/nation in the NASA TechRise Student Challenge where students build experiments that will autonomously operate and collect data from the edge of space aboard a suborbital rocket or a high-altitude balloon test flight. NASA selected the winning teams in an inaugural nationwide challenge designed to attract, engage and prepare future science, technology, engineering and mathematics professionals. Clark was named high altitude balloon winner.

Administered by Future Engineers, the challenge aims to inspire students to seek a deeper understanding of Earth’s atmosphere, space exploration, coding and electronics, as well as an appreciation of the importance of test data. Winning proposals included measuring greenhouse gases, space farm irrigation systems, lunar dust mitigation, exploring human health in space, and understanding the effects of microgravity on physical phenomenon ranging from the behavior of waves in liquids to the effectiveness of ink jet printing. Nearly 600 teams, representing 5,000 sixth- through 12th-grade students from across the country applied to the most recent challenge.

The winning teams will each receive $1,500 to build their experiments and an assigned spot to test them on NASA-sponsored suborbital rocket flights operated by Blue Origin or UP Aerospace, or a high-altitude balloon flight from Raven Aerostar. Clark’s team will build their monitoring gas and oil well emissions project over the next several months, and then it will be tested on a high-altitude balloon.