Two Country Day Students Named Semifinalists in NASA Challenge

Neither Robert Kreidler `24 nor Madden Smith `24 plans on studying physics or engineering when they head to college in the fall, but both were named semifinalists (two of 15 high school students across the country!) in NASA’s Future Engineers: Power to Explore Challenge.

“The students had to learn about the nuclear batteries that power space exploration and dream up a new space mission to a destination with limited or obstructed access to light,” says Julianna Poole-Sawyer, physics teacher. “The competition made students think about what we don’t know. This was a different way of thinking for many of them; they had to think like scientists! Instead of asking, ‘What do we know, and how do we know it?’ students had to ask, ‘What do we not know, and what tests could we do to find the answer?’.”

The student-designed missions had to include the use of radioisotope power systems (RPS); basically, their missions needed to use nuclear power rather than solar power. Thus, Robert sent his mission to Pluto, which is too far away from the sun for solar power to be useful, and Madden sent her mission to Makemake, a dwarf planet even further from the sun than Pluto.

“I liked working in reverse, starting with what we don’t know,” says Madden, who plans on majoring in business or communications when she heads to the University of Kentucky in the fall. “I researched dwarf planets outside our solar system and what we don’t know about those planets. For example, NASA doesn’t know if Makemake has a magnetic field, so I looked up how we would go about figuring that out, which brought me to a space probe. Then I had to figure out how to power the probe and what tools would be needed on the probe.”

Robert, who is considering business or sports management for his major at SMU next year, concentrated his mission on Pluto because no one has landed on it yet. “My initial goal was simply to reach the planet, but then I learned that the largest glacier in our solar system is on Pluto, so my mission involved landing on Pluto to determine the composition of that glacier.”

Both enjoyed the creative freedom of the project.

“I liked how we could concentrate on the future and what hasn't yet been done or discovered,” says Robert. “It was cool to learn more about technology that is available now or could be developed in the future and it was cool that we had the opportunity to come up with our own semi-realistic missions, which might even help NASA one day.”

To learn more about Madden's mission, click here. If you'd like to find out more about Robert's mission, click here.