Science projects are great opportunities to build real-life research experience. And once students experience science fair success, they have opportunities to travel. Along the way, they make friends whom they often see from one competition to the next.

At the 2007 ISEF in Albuquerque, N.M., for example, 25 of the 1,500-plus participants were once finalists in the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge (DCYSC), which is held in Washington, D.C. every fall.

Nick Ekladyous (far left) and teammates explored Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity at the DCYSC in 2004.

Richard Cho, DCYSC

At DCYSC, 40 of the nation’s top middle school science students work in groups to tackle challenges with a scientific theme. They are judged on their problem-solving, teamwork, and communication skills.

Their experiences at DCYSC, say these 25 science fair veterans, have served them well at ISEF.

“DCYSC helped us learn how to present our ideas to adults,” says Sasha Rohret, a 17-year-old senior at the Keystone School in San Antonio, Texas.

At ISEF 2007, Sasha presented the results of her ongoing research on the possibility of growing plants on Mars.

Emily Sohn

“I [also] got a lot of experience with the scientific method,” she says. “I had to work in groups with people I didn’t know.”

From science fairs to Mars

At this year’s ISEF, Sasha presented the results of her 4-year (and counting) study that explores the possibility of growing plants on Mars. She got the idea after seeing a television program about the Mars rovers, robotic spacecraft that landed on the Red Planet in 2004. Sasha was an eighth-grader at the time.

The program said that if people ever wanted to live on Mars, they would need to learn how to grow food there. The idea captured Sasha’s imagination, and her work on the subject has already earned her one trip to DCYSC and three trips to ISEF.

For her experiments, Sasha has grown plants in volcanic soil that resembles Martian soil. She puts the plants in airtight, gas-filled tanks that mimic the atmospheres of Mars and Earth.

Over 4 years of research, Sasha has meticulously measured how plants might grow on the Red Planet under a variety of soil and atmospheric conditions.

Courtesy of Sasha Rohret

Over the years, she has discovered that the relatively large proportion of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the Martian atmosphere is the biggest obstacle to growing plants there. The gas makes up about 97 percent of Mars’ atmosphere, compared with less than 0.05 percent of the atmosphere on Earth.

Mars’ atmosphere is also thinner than Earth’s, so more of the sun’s radiation hits Mars’ surface, Sasha says. Extra radiation is tough on plants.

“You would have to alter the Martian atmosphere quite a bit to grow plants on Mars,” Sasha concludes. However, she remains optimistic. “I think it will happen.”

Some day, Sasha would like to be an astrophysicist—an astronomer who specializes in the physical and chemical properties of objects in outer space. And if she ever gets an invitation to explore Mars, she’ll leap at the chance.

“I would go if I had the opportunity,” she says. “I think it would be pretty fun.”

Science students to the rescue

The science fair veterans in Albuquerque tackled a diverse range of subjects, from botany to mechanical engineering. One thing that many of the projects had in common was their attempt to solve important, real-world problems.

“I always try to do a project every year that will impact society in a positive way,” says Nicholas Ekladyous, 15, now a senior at Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.

At ISEF this year, Nick stood with a crash-test dummy and presented his work on van safety.

Emily Sohn

For his eighth- and ninth-grade projects, Nick aimed to make 15-passenger vans safer. He built a scaled-down model of such a van and then designed a computer program to predict when a real van would be most likely to roll over. The 2-year project earned him a trip to DCYSC in 2004 and to ISEF in 2005.

As a sophomore in 2006, Nick attended ISEF with his design of a safer material for padding playground floors. Finally, for ISEF 2007, Nick used computer models to develop a design for car hoods that would be less harmful to pedestrians struck in traffic accidents.

“If pedestrians are hit, the chances of death are very high,” Nick says.

For his 2007 ISEF project, Nick created a computer program to model how badly pedestrians would be injured when struck by cars with a variety of hood designs.

Emily Sohn

According to Nick, his hood would reduce death and injury to pedestrians by as much as 70 percent compared with current models. He has filed for a patent on his design.

Lessons learned

The exhibition hall at ISEF can be an intimidating place, filled with row after row of projects with hard-to-pronounce names. Still, the DCYSC veterans seemed to be enjoying the scene—sometimes to their surprise.

In the exhibit hall at ISEF each year, more than 1,500 students display the results of work that touches on nearly every topic in science.

Intel

“DCYSC was the first time I got to go to a national competition,” says 16-year-old Lucia Mocz, who conducted her first science fair project in middle school only because it was a class requirement. Lucia is now a junior at Mililani High School in Hawaii.

“That was a major force in getting me interested in science,” she says. “I did not like science before, but [DCYSC] was just so fun. Now, I want to major in math.”

Designing projects for science fairs helped 16-year-old Lucia discover a love of math.

Emily Sohn

Want to experience the science fair scene? First, find a topic you’re passionate about, suggest the DCYSC/ISEF veterans. Then, let the investigations begin.

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Word Find: Fair Dreams

So scientists at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, use rewards to coax the animals. If the bats land on the floor or walls of the wind tunnel and refuse to fly, the scientists move them to an enclosure without food. But “if they fly for a minute without crashing, we feed them,” says Sharon Swartz, a biologist at Brown.

The bats soon learn that to get a treat, they have to fly.

This bat has learned to fly in a wind tunnel, where scientists filmed its motions.

Arnold Song

After weeks of training, the bats learn to fly in place inside the wind tunnel, like a person who can walk or run without falling off a moving treadmill.

Bats on film

Swartz and her colleagues then use high-speed video cameras to film the animals in motion. The work is revealing surprising details about how bats fly.

When they first looked at the images, scientists were stunned to see the complexity of the bats’ movements, especially when compared with those of birds. The work “has really challenged long-held beliefs about how we think about bat flight,” says Betsy Dumont, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

This computer-generated image shows how a bat’s flight alters the flow of the air in the wind tunnel. The blue lines behind the bat (which appears to be multicolored) are streamlines that show how the animal’s motions have disturbed the air.

David Willis and Misha Kostonadov

A better understanding how bats fly, researchers hope, will help them design small flying machines that can move and change direction quickly like bats do. The United States Air Force is so interested in developing batlike aircraft that they’re funding the research.

Fast bat facts

There are about 1,200 species of bats in the world, Swartz says. Some eat fruit. Others eat insects or nectar. And just a few drink blood.

Some bats use their eyes to see where things are. Others collect information about their surroundings by bouncing sound off objects and listening to the echoes.

But what all bats have in common (other than being the only flying mammals in existence) are flexible wings that enable them to change directions quickly. If you’ve ever seen bats darting through the air at dusk, you probably noticed how abruptly they can change directions.

Bats flit about in the night. Their versatile wings enable them to maneuver.

iStockphoto

Scientists have long assumed that bats fly the same way as birds and insects do—with rigid, airplanelike wings that hinge at the shoulder. The problem with that assumption, however, is that bats aren’t birds or insects. As mammals, they have more in common with people, horses, and dogs than with other flying creatures.

Ducks and other birds fly using rigid wings that hinge at the shoulder. Bats use a different technique to stay airborne.

iStockphoto

For example, birds have hollow bones, and insects have no bones at all. But most mammals have solid, heavy bones, which would make flying tough.

To solve this problem, bats have evolved strong, heavy bones near their shoulders, where they need more support. They’ve also saved some weight by developing lighter, weaker bones near the tips of their wings. The result is a light, but strong, and very flexible, wing.

Bat wings

Bats flap their wings very quickly, so scientists must use extremely fast cameras to study these animals in flight. This type of technology has only recently become available and affordable.

“In the past, if you wanted to get 1,000 frames a second, you would need so much light you would probably burn the bat,” Swartz says. “Now, we have cameras that are able to take lots of images with relatively little light.”

Swartz studies a bat called the dog-faced fruit bat. An adult weighs about 1 ounce and measures about 11 inches across from wingtip to wingtip.

Before filming, the researchers put 54 white dots all over the bat’s wings. Then, they put the bat into a wind tunnel that is about 50 inches long and about 50 inches wide.

In a wind tunnel, a powerful fan at one end blows a steady breeze toward the other end. Bats can fly against the wind while staying in front of cameras that record their wing movements.

iStockphoto

As the bat flies, three high-speed cameras capture the animal’s movements from different angles. A computer program then processes the movements of the white dots on the wings to produce a three-dimensional virtual bat. In slow motion, the virtual bat reveals exactly how its wings move every fraction of a second during flight.

The first time that Swartz saw the results, she was amazed.

Computer simulations show how air flows around a bat’s wing while the animal is flying slowly (top image; at about 7 miles per hour) and more quickly (bottom; at about 16 miles per hour).

David Willis

“The motion of these bat wings is just gorgeous,” she says. “It’s like a dancer. It’s fabulous.”

Swartz was also surprised to see how complicated the wings’ motions are during flight. The wings curve and change shape constantly as the animal flies, but they never flatten like airplane wings. That shows that even if airplanes flapped their wings, they wouldn’t be flying the same way as bats do.

On the down stroke, one wing sometimes even covers the other for a fraction of a second. “It’s as if the bat were about to fold up and go to sleep,” Swartz says. “You wouldn’t expect that if you believed the flapping-airplane model.”

A real bat mobile?

Before bat ancestors developed wings more than 80 million years ago, the animals had arms and grasping fingers. As bats evolved, their bodies changed to make flight possible. Bats today still have elbow joints and individual finger bones hidden inside their wings, but they only use them to adjust the shape of their wings.

Bats have become excellent flyers, Dumont says. “Just think about these animals flying around at night at a decent speed and maneuvering around objects,” she says. “It’s spectacular.”

Engineers would like to design vehicles that fly the way bats do. The military could use small, unmanned aircraft that maneuver through war zones without attracting attention. Tiny, batlike flying machines that could make tight turns in small spaces would also be helpful during emergencies, such as fires, earthquakes, or volcanic eruptions, to rescue people from tight, collapsed spaces or perform other tasks.

Bats are small and can maneuver well in small spaces. Despite their sometimes mysterious and elusive nature, there is a lot we can learn from them.

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Word Find: Flight 

The top three finishers in the 2005 Grand Challenge race for driverless vehicles (from left to right): Stanford University’s 2004 Volkswagen Touareg sports utility vehicle (nicknamed Stanley) and Carnegie Mellon University’s pair of Humvees, Highlander an

Carnegie Mellon University

Last year, 15 teams made it to the finals of the first Grand Challenge, a 142-mile (228-kilometer) road race across the desert (see “Robots on a Rocky Road“).

Any type of vehicle could enter the contest, but there was one big twist. Drivers were not allowed. Neither were passengers nor remote controls. Vehicles had to drive themselves over rugged terrain and around obstacles, with no help from people. None of the entries made it.

After watching vehicle after vehicle stall, crash, or burn, competitors refined their strategies and learned their lessons. This year, five out of the 23 finalists completed the 130-mile (210-kilometer) course through the Mojave Desert along the California-Nevada border.

About to cross the finish line, the driverless vehicle dubbed Stanley traversed more than 200 kilometers of rough terrain without human assistance.

D. Orenstein/Stanford

The winner of the $2 million prize was a blue 2004 Volkswagen Touareg sports utility vehicle, nicknamed Stanley. Customized by researchers at Stanford University with help from industry partners such as Volkswagen, Stanley easily beat a 10-hour time limit on the race. It breezed past the finish line in just under 6 hours, 54 minutes, and its average speed was slightly more than 30 kilometers per hour (19 miles per hour). At times, it topped 60 kilometers per hour (37 miles per hour).

Two vehicles developed by Carnegie Mellon University, Highlander and Sandstorm, came second and third. An earlier version of Sandstorm had competed in the first race and had traveled farther than any other entry.

Race veteran Sandstorm finished third in this year’s Grand Challenge.

Carnegie Mellon University

A U.S. government agency called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created and sponsored the Grand Challenge. Given a boost by DARPA’s race, robotic vehicle technology is coming closer to fulfilling a government requirement that one-third of future army vehicles be driverless. The military would like to find better ways to transport goods during wartime without endangering soldiers.

This year’s resounding success was a result of recent advances in sensors and computer software, experts say. Stanley had five laser-beam sensors on its roof. It also had a specialized system for avoiding obstacles that was trained on data collected as human drivers navigated the car over a variety of terrain.

Soldiers aren’t the only ones who stand to benefit from the new technology. Someday, all cars and trucks might incorporate similar strategies to make our own road adventures safer and easier.—E. Sohn

Going Deeper:

Weiss, Peter. 2005. Road warriors: Robotic vehicles triumph over desert obstacles. Science News 168(Oct. 15):244. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20051015/fob3.asp .

Sohn, Emily. 2004. Robots on a rocky road. Science News for Kids (April 21). Available at http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20040421/Feature1.asp .

You can learn more about the DARPA Grand Challenge at www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ or www.grandchallenge.org/ (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

The Stanford University team has a Web site at www.stanfordracing.com/ (Stanford University).

The two Carnegie Mellon University teams have a Web site at www.redteamracing.org/ (Carnegie Mellon University).

Penguins have flexible, powerful flippers that allow them to maneuver quickly and smoothly in water.

Dolphins and seals can perform similar aquabatics.

These marine animals are more than just fun to watch. They’re also inspiring engineers to look for better ways of propelling boats. You never see a submarine do what a penguin can do, but wouldn’t it be cool if it could?

Propellers let ships travel in a relatively straight line over great distances. Today’s engineers are trying to design vessels that can do a lot more than that. They want boats able to withstand stormy conditions that would shatter an existing craft. They want boats that can maneuver quickly in tight spaces. They want boats that can sense currents or waves and respond in a split second to hold their position. In effect, they want to reinvent the penguin—or perhaps the whale or fish.

A penguin’s flippers are a good starting point.

All dressed up

Propeller blades just spin. Penguin flippers do much more.

A penguin’s flipper is like a hard, stiff paddle covered with tiny feathers. It’s shaped a bit like an airplane wing. A flipper can flap up and down, move forward and backward, and twist around at the joint where it’s attached to the penguin’s body.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, researchers are working on a new propulsion system for ships that mimics a penguin’s flippers. Their artificial wooden flippers move a boat forward or backward by generating high-energy rings of spinning water. Other flipper movements steer the craft right, left, up, or down.

The MIT team is now testing how various flipper movements affect a boat’s motion, doing experiments in giant basins of water.

The scientists envision using a pair of flippers in place of a propeller to move a boat along. More futuristic vessels could have as many as 50 flapping flippers, each one moving independently.

But it’ll take many more years of research before the Navy or anyone else can launch high-tech ships driven by flippers.

A new kind of fin

Flexibility also helps move things along in water.

Marine animals such as dolphins and seals aren’t made of stiff materials. They’re squishy, like human skin and muscle.

Flexible materials can store energy in ways that stiff ones can’t. When a dolphin flexes its tail as far as it’ll bend, it stores energy in its body—just like a stretched rubber band. When the tail slams down and straightens, this stored energy is released, and the dolphin shoots forward.

Engineers at Nekton Research, a company in Durham, N.C., have designed flexible fins for an underwater vehicle to take advantage of such cycles of storing and releasing energy.

The craft, called PilotFish, is shaped like a giant egg with four fins coming out of its waist. It’s more than 3 feet long and weighs 350 pounds.

PilotFish is shaped like an egg with four fins coming out of its waist.

Nekton Research

PilotFish can’t travel long distances quickly. Instead, maneuverability is its specialty. And it can get going in a fraction of a second. Moreover, unlike any other watercraft, it can stop almost instantaneously just by slamming its fins forward.

“The thing looks like it hit a wall. It stops dead,” says Chuck Pell, who helped design the fins. “The only other things that can do that are alive.”

PilotFish is designed to operate in water too turbulent for other craft. For example, it could be used to inspect the underwater portions of structures such as bridges and docks.

Each of PilotFish’s flexible fins is connected to a motor inside the craft.

Nekton Research

A river’s waves or current can easily overcome or carry away a propeller-driven craft before it can perform an inspection. In contrast, PilotFish reacts to its environment quickly enough to stay in place. If the craft encounters an unexpected object, it can immediately stop to avoid bumping into it. If a wave rolls it over, PilotFish can right itself before the next wave comes.

To accomplish all this, PilotFish’s fins generate huge forces. “You have to careful around it. You could break an arm,” Pell says. He notes that he once ended up with a sprained wrist when a moving fin accidentally struck his hand.

Whale watch

For their size, humpback whales are surprisingly agile. This 50-foot, 30-ton animal can swim in a tight corkscrew pattern, sometimes less than 10 feet across.

A humpback whale shows off a side flipper with its distinctive scalloped edge.

W. Rossiter

The whales do this not for fun but to capture a meal. They blow bubbles as they swim in this spiral pattern, creating a rising barrier around a cylinder of water. Tiny shrimp and small fish get trapped in the cylinder, and the whale simply swims up through the concentrated feast for its meal.

Scientists have long wondered how humpbacks manage this feat. They’ve been particularly curious about bumps along the leading edge of a humpback’s long, narrow flippers.

To find out, researchers built two artificial whale flippers. One flipper had a scalloped edge, and the other was smooth. They then tested the two flippers in a wind tunnel. Although air is much less dense than water, it’s still a fluid, and the researchers could adjust the air’s speed so that it behaved like water rushing over a humpback’s flipper.

Researchers built models of a humpback whale’s flipper (left) and another whale’s flipper (right) to compare their performances.

L. Howle

The scientists found that the bumps reduce drag and increase a flipper’s lift so it behaves more like an airplane wing. This extra lift and reduced drag lets a humpback whale make sharper turns than other whales can make.

Someday, engineers designing flippers or fins to drive boats and submarines might add bumps or scallops, too.

Kayak flippers

Artificial fins inspired by one marine animal, the penguin, are already available—though not where scientists might have predicted. They’re in a foot-powered propulsion system for kayaks designed by engineers at Hobie Cat in Oceanside, Calif.

The two underwater fins of a Hobie Cat kayak are powered by a person pedaling while sitting on the craft. They are more efficient than hand-held oars.

G. Ketterman

Instead of paddling, you sit in the kayak and pedal with your feet. Your pedaling powers two flexible fins.

At the start of each stroke, the fins twist and flex in such a way that they assume the shape of a propeller blade. A penguin’s flipper flexes in the same way when the swimming bird wants to move itself forward.

The fins move larger volumes of water than a traditional oar can yet require less energy to do so. This lets kayakers go farther and faster, without getting as tired as when paddling with oars.

Hobie Cat’s pedaled kayaks are leading the way in applications of nature-inspired flipper design. Other applications are bound to follow.

Maybe someday you’ll be able to go to an aquarium show featuring underwater vehicles, gliding gracefully, racing around rocks, and leaping out of the water to wow a crowd—doing what comes naturally to penguins and dolphins.

Going Deeper:

Word Find: Engineering Fins

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Humpback Whale Facts

Adult males measure 40 to 48 feet; adult females measure 45 to 50 feet.

Adult humpbacks weigh 25 to 40 tons.

The whales feed on krill and various kinds of small fish.

They are found in all the world’s oceans. Most populations of humpback whales follow a regular migration route, summering in temperate and polar waters for feeding and wintering in tropical waters for mating and calving.

Its flippers are very long, between one-quarter and one-third the length of its body.

Source: American Cetacean Society (www.acsonline.org/)

Here’s the catch. Once it leaves the starting line, your vehicle has to drive itself.

Welcome to a recent competition sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA’s Grand Challenge, held for the first time last month, offered $1 million to the team whose vehicle completed the course in the shortest time.

A wide variety of teams accepted the challenge, from high school students with a budget of just a few thousand dollars to professional engineers who had millions of dollars to burn. The contending vehicles included motorcycles, golf carts, sport utility vehicles, and a hybrid car with a gas-electric engine, all loaded up with computers and complicated gadgetry.

Carnegie Mellon University’s robot vehicle, Sandstorm, navigates hilly terrain.

DARPA

Among the 15 teams that made it to the final round on March 13, spirits were high when the race started at 6:30 a.m. in Barstow, Calif. Less than 4 hours later, all the vehicles had crashed, stalled, caught fire, or leaked oil. The vehicle that made it the farthest, from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, covered just 7.4 miles before slamming into a roadside barrier that stopped it dead.

Based on these results, you might think that the competition was a total failure. After all, none of the machines even came close to finishing. To most team members and DARPA organizers, however, the first annual Grand Challenge was a great success.

“We were very, very satisfied with the performance of all the teams,” said DARPA’s Jan Walker. “We gave them a big challenge, and they really stepped up to it.”

Smart machines

No one really expected perfection on the first try.

According to DARPA, one main goal of the Grand Challenge is to push forward the technology for self-navigating, or autonomous, vehicles. Developing such vehicles will take time, and DARPA is trying to steer research in that direction.

“Smart” vehicles could replace people in battle and other dangerous situations, said Air Force Col. Jose Negron, Grand Challenge program manager. He answered questions on the radio program Science Friday the day before the competition.

“The most important thing,” Negron said, “is that this technology will come back to the United States military to help save human lives.”

The U.S. Congress has ordered the army to replace at least one third of its battlefield vehicles with autonomous versions by the year 2015.

The other main goal of the competition is to seek out new ideas and technologies from people not already working with the military.

Anyone and everyone—students, backyard enthusiasts, the nation’s top scientists—were invited to take part. “We’re really trying to find that new idea out there,” Negron said.

New ideas

Indeed, ideas came from all over the place, and strategies were as varied as the people who came up with them. The most sophisticated technologies came from teams with the biggest budgets. Carnegie Mellon, for one, spent $3.5 million and had major sponsors backing its effort. Teams with less money had to be more crafty.

Still, vehicles in the competition shared some basic capabilities. For one thing, all had sensors that took in information about the world around them.

The Carnegie Mellon vehicle, a souped-up Humvee (HMMWV) called Sandstorm, had two cameras set up like a pair of eyes to produce three-dimensional images of the terrain in front of it. It also used radar and laser ranging to gather information about the vehicle’s surroundings.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Sandstorm required a lot of high-tech gear to race on the Grand Challenge course.

DARPA

As data came pouring in from the sensors, on-board computers translated the information into a streaming view of the world. The vehicle then had to react appropriately, steering clear of boulders and other obstacles or staying on a steep, narrow, winding road.

In this year’s Grand Challenge, DARPA officials didn’t reveal the precise route until 4 a.m. of the day of the race. Teams then had just a few hours to load landmarks and other details into their vehicle computers and program Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers for navigation.

The race’s route (yellow line) took self-controlled vehicles across rough desert terrain between Barstow, Calif., and Primm, Nev. The squares near the starting point mark how far various vehicles went before failing in their attempt to navigate the route.

The route was a challenge for everybody. The first 5 miles alone featured dirt roads, huge boulders, and lots of steep switchbacks.

Next year

Most teams left the competition determined to come back with better systems and vehicles. “We will improve the stereo cameras, radar, and laser immediately,” said CMU team leader William L. “Red” Whitaker. The team also wants to enhance the vehicle’s planning of its course.

The team’s military surplus Humvee proved to be tough and reliable, Whitaker said. Nonetheless, it hopes to upgrade its vehicle to a newer model for next year’s challenge.

CMU’s team is into speed as much as accuracy, Whitaker emphasized. Sandstorm travels as fast as 40 miles per hour.

While university engineers such as Whitaker were applying decades of experience to the challenge, teenagers from California were learning some lessons of their own. About 40 kids from Palos Verdes High School worked on a donated Acura, which qualified for the race.

Palos Verdes High School students and their Grand Challenge vehicle, Doom Buggy.

DARPA

“We used a laser rangefinder and GPS,” said Nathan Howard, a 17-year-old junior with the Palos Verdes team. “We didn’t read any technical manuals. We just sort of worked things out in our heads and programmed them up and then tested them out in the car.”

On race day, the team’s vehicle missed a turn near the start and crashed into a barrier. Next year, the students plan to reorganize their team into small work groups and focus on fine-tuning the car’s steering components. They’ll also apply some of the things they learned this year about planning and taking projects one step at a time.

Nevertheless, the students were happy with how they did. “I’m proud of our effort,” Howard said. “It showed that our ideas were feasible and that the car could work.”

Other teams were impressed, too.

“The most wonderful thing about this year’s competition was meeting future generations that will do this kind of work,” Whitaker said. “Kids out there should know that robotics is looking to them . . . to achieve what hasn’t been done yet.”

The next big idea could be yours. Start your engine!

Going Deeper:

Word Find: Robot Race

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The Hyper-X recently broke the record for air-breathing jet planes when it traveled at a hypersonic speed of seven times the speed of sound. That’s about 5,000 miles per hour. At this speed, you’d get around the world—flying along the equator—in less than 5 hours.

Powered by its scramjet engines (shown in gold), the black, unmanned X-43A flew at a record speed for an air-breathing jet plane. The experimental plane is only 12 feet long.

NASA

The Hyper-X is an unmanned, experimental aircraft just 12 feet long. It achieves hypersonic speed using a special sort of engine known as a scramjet. It may sound like something from a comic book, but engineers have been experimenting with scramjets since the 1960s.

For an engine to burn fuel and produce energy, it needs oxygen. A jet engine, like those on passenger airplanes, gets oxygen from the air. A rocket engine typically goes faster but has to carry its own supply of oxygen. A scramjet engine goes as fast as a rocket, but it doesn’t have to carry its own oxygen supply.

A scramjet’s special design allows it to extract oxygen from the air that flows through the engine. And it does so without letting the fast-moving air put out the combustion flames. However, a scramjet engine works properly only at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound.

A booster rocket carried the Hyper-X to an altitude of about 100,000 feet for its test flight. The aircraft’s record-beating flight lasted just 11 seconds.

In the future, engineers predict, airplanes equipped with scramjet engines could transport cargo quickly and cheaply to the brink of space. Hypersonic airliners could carry passengers anywhere in the world in just a few hours.

Out of the three experimental Hyper-X aircraft built for NASA, only one is now left. The agency has plans for another, 11-second hypersonic flight, this time at 10 times the speed of sound.

Hang on tight!—S. McDonagh

Going Deeper:

Weiss, Peter. 2004. Soaring at hyperspeed: Long-sought technology finally propels a plane. Science News 165(April 3):213-214. Available at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040403/fob6.asp .

You can learn more about NASA’s Hyper-X plane at oea.larc.nasa.gov/PAIS/FS-2003-07-77-LaRC.html and www.nasa.gov/missions/research/x43-main.html (NASA).