December 7, 2020

Colleagues:

On behalf of Assistant Secretary Scott Stump, I am pleased to pass along the announcement of five (5) finalists in CTE Mission: CubeSat, a national challenge to build technical skills for careers in space and beyond. Finalists will each receive $5,000 and in-kind prizes that they may use to build CubeSat (cube satellite) prototypes in the second phase of the challenge. A video of Assistant Secretary Stump announcing the winners is available at https://www.ctemissioncubesat.com/five-finalists-announced/.

The winners are:

• Anderson Clark Magnet High School (La Crescenta, California) is studying whether local encampments are in high-risk wildfire areas, with the goal of helping the local fire department save lives of people without housing.
• Freeport High School (Freeport, New York) is measuring Earth’s surface temperature to study the differences in heat absorption and retention between urban and rural areas.
• Mooresville High School (Mooresville, North Carolina) is measuring the effect of their town’s population growth on air quality, land use, and temperature.
• Opelika High School (Opelika, Alabama) is collaborating with Columbus High School and Northside High School (Columbus, Georgia). The team plans to collect performance data for a new type of core material used in NASA-grade fluxgate magnetometers, which are used to study Earth’s changing magnetic field.
• Princeton High School (Princeton, New Jersey) is collaborating with Montgomery High School (Skillman, New Jersey). The team wants to optimize space missions by examining topics such as atmospheric pressure density or habitable planetary environments.

Stay tuned to the CTE Mission: CubeSat website (https://www.ctemissioncubesat.com/) for further information on the finalists and updates as they build and launch their CubeSat prototypes over the coming months.

Best –

Sharon Lee Miller
Director, Division of Academic and Technical Education