Delhi school team wins NASA space settlement design contest

The Amity International School, Noida, has won the prestigious 20th Annual International Space Settlement Design Competition, 2015, held at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA during 2-4 August.

A team of 12 students - Dhruv Khanna, Aabhas Vaish, Aman Agarwal, Anuj Harisinghani, Rishab Srivastava, Chittaranjan Prasad, Suchit Jain, Rahul Rajput, Tanay Asija, Anant Chaturvedi, Grishma Purewal from Class XI and Mudit Gupta from Class X - were part of a company that won the competition.

The 12 Amity students were part of a company named 'Vulture Aviation', which also included teams from Latin America, North America and two teams from the UK and the USA.

The competition saw participation of four such companies with 50 participants each.

''Students who were part of 'Vulture Aviation' were clubbed with teams from Latin America and North America and two selected team finalists from the UK and USA,'' said school principal Renu Singh.

The Amity team designed two main settlements and four outlying settlements to accommodate a population of 24,000 as well as a transient of 3,000 more on Mars using a transparent material, 'Aluminium Oxinitride'.

The team members also worked on aspects such as automation engineering, operations engineering, human engineering, marketing and finance, scheduling and cost.

The team worked on the design for 48 hours.

Presenting a brief about the project, Aabhas Vaish said that the Mars Space Settlement was named 'Argonom Bult' and proposed to be designed inside a crater.

He further added that the selection of location for the Mars colony depended on the quality of soil and amount of dust storm in the particular area.

He said that the total cost involved in building a colony for 24,000 habitants would be $1,225,571,360,000 dollars (a little over $1.2 trillion).

Amita Chauhan, chairperson, Amity International Schools, said, ''We are proud to have such brilliant students who have made the country proud with their talent and hard work. We are inspired by scientist and visionary Dr APJ Abdul Kalam's work in science and technology. We had been participating in the competition for eight years now, but this year we finally made it to the top.''

The International Space Settlement Design Competition is a prestigious contest which aims to impart industrial skills in students.