Students at East Liverpool High School in Ohio developing technology to send cats to space

Editor’s Word: College students in media manufacturing on the faculty interviewed the scholars who gained and despatched us their video.

EAST LIVERPOOL, Ohio (WKBN) — Have you ever ever dreamed of going to area? Would you are taking your cat with you?

What began out as a joke is now a pupil challenge funded by a NASA grant.

College students at East Liverpool Excessive College gained a $1,500 grant from NASA to develop an area go well with for cats. They’re 1 of 60 winners throughout america.

The scholars are engaged on creating expertise that might sometime presumably permit astronauts to take pets to area, turning an extraordinary home cat right into a “cat-stronaut.”

“We selected cats in area for this challenge as a result of it’s discovered by means of the COVID disaster with having contact with a small animal like a cat is excellent for psychological well being,” stated East Liverpool STEM trainer/staff chief Gerald Bartlett. “As we transfer into pioneering in the direction of moon and martian colonies, it will likely be essential to think about psychological well being of our astronauts.”

College students had been requested to provide you with a giant challenge for his or her senior 12 months. They submitted a four-page proposal. It’s all a part of the NASA TechRise Scholar Problem.

NASA can ship this challenge on a high-altitude balloon flight for testing. However don’t fear, no cats will likely be harm by the experiment.

“We will likely be placing assessments and completely different meters in there, not an precise cat, to verify the cat would survive an precise area launch,” stated pupil Preston Dawson.

“The cat may be very a lot pretend,” stated pupil Riley Cox.

“We’ll begin with doing all of the analysis to see what micro-controllers we have to use, how we put it into the go well with, how large we have to make it,” stated pupil Lee Michaelwitz.

Cox proposed the cats in area thought. At first, she stated her classmates weren’t over the moon about it.

“Everybody hated my thought,” Cox stated. “They stated that it might by no means win and it was not a good suggestion. Then they had been like, it’s very foolish so perhaps it would win. So I feel foolish concepts are the very best concepts.”

East Liverpool wasn’t the one native faculty to be chosen for the NASA grant. Canfield Excessive College college students additionally acquired a grant.

Along with the monetary assist, college students will meet with an engineer as soon as per week over Zoom to assist information their initiatives.