Virginia Students Win First NASA Virtual Exploration Challenge

A team of high school and college students entered a virtual world to win a NASA challenge.

Students from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. collaborated with teenagers from Grassfield High School Technology Academy in Chesapeake, Va., to capture the first ever Virtual Exploration Sustainability Challenge or VESC, sponsored by the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) and NASA's Langley Research Center, both in Hampton, Va., and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The modeling and simulation contest pairs undergraduate engineering students with high school students. The teams work together in an online virtual environment to solve a NASA-inspired design project. This year's contest was based on a real engineering challenge - how to maintain and upgrade the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.