Graphic of the planets superimposed on a keyboard

NASA's Scientist for a Day Essay Contest is back for its 15th year, inviting students in grades 5 through 12 to investigate three distant worlds and write an essay about one they would want to explore further.

The worlds chosen for this year's contest are some of the most mysterious and distant in our solar system: Uranus' moon Miranda, Neptune's moon Triton and Pluto's moon Charon. Each has been visited by spacecraft during a single, brief flyby. NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by Miranda and Triton in the 1980s, and the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Charon in 2015. All three flybys provided the only up-close – and stunning – images we have of these worlds.

To enter the contest, which is hosted in the U.S. and more than a dozen countries, students must submit an essay of up to 500 words explaining why they would want to send a spacecraft to explore the world of their choosing. Essays can also be submitted by teams of up to four students.

Winning essays will be chosen for each topic and grade group (5 to 6, 7 to 8 and 9 to 12) and featured on the NASA Solar System Exploration website. Additionally, U.S. contest winners and their classes will have the chance to participate in a video conference or teleconference with NASA.

Entries for the U.S. contest are due Feb. 20, 2020, on the NASA Scientist for a Day website. (Deadlines for the international contests may vary by host country.) Visit the website for more information, including rules, international contest details and past winners.

For teachers interested in using the contest as a classroom assignment, learn more here. Plus, explore these standards-aligned lessons and activities to get students engaged in space travel and planetary science:

TAGS: K-12 Education, Teachers, Educators, Students, Contests, Competitions, Essay, Language Arts, Science, Planets, Solar System, Moons

  • Kim Orr
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Side-by-side images of Clara Ma, wearing braces, in 2009 posing for a picture in front of a Curiosity rover model and Ma in 2019 posing for a photo in Europe

Students have just over one week more to enter NASA’s Name the Rover Essay Contest. While they put the finishing touches on their essays (due Nov. 1, 2019), meet the most recent naming contest winner, Clara Ma. Find out what Ma is up to more than 10 years after submitting her winning name for the Mars rover now known as Curiosity and why she says the experience changed her life.

› Read more on JPL News

› Find related resources for educators

 

TAGS: Curiosity, Rover, Contest, Mars, Students, K-12, Teachers, Language Arts, Essay, Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

  • Kim Orr
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NASA is inviting students to help name its next Mars rover! Set to launch from Florida in the summer of 2020, NASA’s fifth rover to visit the Red Planet is designed to study past environments capable of supporting life, seek signs of ancient microbial life, collect rock and soil samples for a possible future return to Earth, and test technologies that could produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere for use by humans one day. But before it can do that, it needs a name.

Following in the tracks of NASA’s four previous Mars rovers, the agency is asking students to suggest a name. The first Mars rover, which landed in 1997, was called the Microrover Flight Experiment until a 12-year old student from Connecticut suggested the name Sojourner, in honor of abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth. In 2004, a third-grade student from Arizona named NASA’s twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Curiosity, which landed in 2012 and is the most recent rover to visit Mars, was named by a sixth-grade student in Kansas.

To enter the Name the Rover Essay Contest, individual students must submit an essay of up to 150 words by Nov. 1, 2019. In their essay, students will need to propose the name they think best suits the rover and explain their reasoning. Judges will select three finalists (one each from grades K-4, 5-8 and 9-12) from every state and U.S. territory. From there, judges will narrow down the finalists further before they select a final name in the spring of 2020.

So what makes a good name? There are lots of ways to become inspired, but students should start by learning about the rover as well as the Red Planet and why we explore. But they shouldn’t stop there. There are many ways to spark ideas from students, including writing planetary poetry, making cosmic art, and having them build rovers of their own. Get students thinking and writing creatively, and encourage them to submit their essay!

› Enter the contest

The contest is open to U.S. residents enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade in a U.S. school (including U.S. territories and schools operated by the U.S. for the children of American personnel overseas). Home-school students can also submit a name!

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TAGS: Mars, rover, contest, Mars 2020, K-12 education, STEM, language arts, essay, science, students

  • Lyle Tavernier
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