WORCESTER, Mass. - A team of Worcester Academy students is taking their project to new heights. They’ve been selected to work with NASA for the TechRise Student Challenge project.

The Worcester Academy group’s project was chosen out of a nationwide pool to go on a microgravity exploration mission aboard an up aerospace rocket.

NASA sent the students a kit to build their project, which will use cameras to photo analyze space debris. They say even a tiny piece of debris can cause a great deal of damage to working satellites.

The students are excited to work with and learn from tech-rise engineers.

“Because that’s what they do, and that’s their profession, so it’s a good opportunity for us to get to know what that feels like to be with that engineering team,” team member Katie Adiletta said.

“It’s good because we can learn NASA’s history, what they’ve done in the past and ways that we can make a more positive impact in space exploration,” team member Ritvik Chand said.

“We hope that through our project we are going to be able to gain accurate data that were able to be applied, hopefully, to technologies in the future that will mitigate the risks that space debris poses to technologies in orbit,” project innovator and team lead, Donovan Sappet, said. 

The group says the project will be ready and shipped off by the end of the school year and will launch in early 2023.