PARKTON, Md. — A group of students at Baltimore County's Hereford High School is soaring high, after winning a NASA-sponsored science challenge.
Their idea - to test for microplastics in the atmosphere - was one of 60 designs nationwide to win this year's NASA TechRise Challenge.
Now they'll get to to see their experiment come to life, on a four-hour balloon flight 70,000 feet in the air in Arizona.
Rachel Holbrook, Aya Elamrani-Zerifi, Cecelia Curtis, Amanda Shener and Athena Zhou are all in 10th grade and in the Society of Women Engineers.
The challenge was to design an experiment that could be tested on either a high-altitude balloon or a rocket-powered lander. The Hereford team is calling their design "Ferrofluid Fiesta," in reference to ferrofluid, a magnetic liquid that they'll be using to pull microplastics out of the atmosphere.
First, they experimented at school to see if microplastics would be drawn to the ferrofluid. Athena Zhou said they cut up toothbrush bristles to simulate microplastics, and concluded that they would be attracted to the ferrofluids.
Rachel Holbrook noted that microplastics are "a very prevalent issue in society recently. There's been a lot of studies [where]... they found microplastics in a lot of lung tissue, and also blood, so we really wanted to find a solution to getting them out of the atmosphere."
The girls were excited when they learned that they were one of the winners, getting $1,500 to help build their experiment and technical advisers from Future Engineers.
Amanda Shener said: "We didn't expect to win at all, but we're really glad that we did."
