By KEN CARPENTER
Great Bend Post
GREAT BEND — A science project designed by 6th and 8th-grade students at Pawnee Heights School in Rozel will be aboard a Blue Origin rocket in about a year. Their project was one of 57 nationwide selected as winners in the first NASA TechRise Student Challenge.
11 students, with the help of their science teacher David Auldridge, came up with a proposal for a coffee grinder that can be used in zero gravity. They will receive $1,500 to build the device. Auldridge explained how the idea came about.
“We did research on what’s coffee like for the astronauts,” Auldridge said. “We discovered they don’t have fresh-made coffee; they’ve got freeze-dried everything. So we started talking about it and looking at it. And we wrote a proposal to give astronauts that fresh brewed coffee, designing this coffee grinder that would hopefully work in micro-gravity. That’s our first big test, to see if we can get it to work.”
According to Auldridge, submitting the proposal was just the beginning of the project. Building the coffee grinder will be the next step.
“We’re going to start looking at actually getting materials and having the kids in our shop on the high school side help us out, milling some stuff and getting the components ready," Auldridge explained. "How are we going to attach this motor? So that’s the next six months' worth of work, to get it all ready and shipped off back to the folks at Blue Origin so they can launch it approximately this time next year.”
The coffee grinder will be placed on an unmanned capsule where the Pawnee Heights students will be able to test it by remote control.