NASA recently announced the winners of two contests for students.
The first, which was the first annual NASA Lunar Art Contest (sponsored by NASA’s Langley Research Center), was designed to challenge students in the arts, science, and engineering to collaboratively engage in NASA’s mission to return humans to the Moon, and eventually journey to Mars and beyond. The contest was open to high school and college students.
First prize winner in the college division was Justin Burns, a sophomore at the University of Memphis, whose piece, “Traffic Jam,” depicted a lunar traffic jam. Second place went to “A busy day on the moon” by senior Johnathan Culpepper of New York City’s Medgar Evers College. Third place went to “Enabling Exploration” by graduate students Lann Brumlilk and Corey DiRutigliano of the University of Cincinnati. Fourth place went to “Perseid Meteor Shower on a Newly Terraformed Moon” by senior Ellen Ladwig of the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
In the high school division, there was a tie for the first place honors: “Pole Colony” by home-schooled senior Asa Shultz; and “To the Moon and Beyond” by sophomore William Zhang of the Skoldberg Art Academy.
All the winning entries are available on this page. They’ll also be exhibited at NASA Langley, the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton, and at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, this summer.
The other recently completed contest was NASA’s 50th Anniversary Essay Competition, which challenged middle school and junior high students to discuss, in an essay of up to 500 words, one of two topics: “how they have benefitted in their everyday lives from aerospace technologies built by NASA during the past 50 years, or, how their lives may be different 50 years in the future because of NASA technology.”
The winner of a $5,000 college scholarship and a trip to view a space shuttle launch at Kennedy Space Center is Jackson Warley of the Renaissance Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He wrote, in part “the underlying spirit and principles of NASA…’ heeds the basic human calling to explore the unknown and in doing so, gives people motivation.”
The $2,500 second-prize winner is Grace Nowadly of Berkeley Middle School in Williamsburg, Virginia. Third price, and a $1,000 scholarship, went to Megha Subramanian of Hershey Middle School in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
NASA also named seven additional regional winners: Pauline Chong of Hacienda Heights, California; Vy Huang Duong of Beaverton, Oregon; Mary Beth Maggio of Natchitoches, Louisiana; Kevin Pulone or Auburndale, Florida; Kyle Stai of Kaiserslautern, Germany; Yichuan Wang of Midland, Michigan; and Max Yenter of Rosholt, Wisconsin. In all, they recieved more than 1,000 essays from students in 37 states and 15 countries. Links to all the winning essays are available on this page.