Seven students from Odisha in the Young Tinker Academy got selected to send their experiment to space via NASA's SR-7 Rocket in Virginia, USA on June 24.

The Young Tinker Academy was launched by educationist Anil Pradhan and Vaishali Sharma to provide live online hands-on learning to students. The students were selected to be in the team after two rounds of interviews by the mentors of Young Tinker Academy themselves. Since then, online mentoring sessions had begun, and the selected students were prepared for the Cubes in Space 2021 competition.

The team got to know that whenever one sends any type of spacecraft missions, rovers, orbiters, landers, fly-by missions into space, he needs to add fasteners to it to fasten things and for numerous other reasons, different types of fasteners are used. These fasteners face a lot of vibrations throughout the entire course of spaceflight. But there have been incidents where these fasteners become loose leading to accidents that cause severe loss. So, the team decided to conduct an experiment in which efficiency of four different types of fasteners were tested.

“We first researched the various materials, types and sizes of fasteners that are currently used by NASA, ISRO and various other space organisations. We studied the various tests which were being conducted on the fasteners to test them. We had to set up a post-flight analysis plan so we decided that we will be conducting all the tests which can be done here in Odisha,” said the team members.