STUDENTS OFFERED CHANCE TO DESIGN DEEP SPACE HABITAT

The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

HOUSTON -- NASA is offering college and university students a chance 
to help design a deep space habitat. The Exploration Habitat (X-Hab) 
Academic Innovation Challenge is accepting applications for the 2013 
challenge, inviting students to design, manufacture, assemble and 
test systems for use on NASA's deep space habitat prototype. 

Past projects have included an inflatable loft for crew sleeping 
quarters, plant growth systems and sample handling tools. This year, 
students in multiple disciplines can choose projects from a variety 
of possibilities, including photovoltaic solar arrays, a workstation 
to support human-robotic collaboration or a telepresence and holodeck 
conceptual system. Students will work together on potential solutions 
to needs future astronauts might have living and working outside 
Earth. 

"Students will play a vital role in our critical early system planning 
and development," said Alvin Drew, a NASA astronaut and habitat 
systems project manager at the agency's Johnson Space Center in 
Houston. "Their designs could become the basis for the concepts and 
technologies that will make up the habitat we eventually send to 
space." 

The X-Hab Challenge is part of a continuing effort to engage and 
retain students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, 
or STEM, and provide a real-world challenge exposing them to 
engineering and design processes. NASA will directly benefit from the 
development of innovative habitation-related concepts and 
technologies that could be applied to future missions. 

The challenge is run by the National Space Grant Foundation for the 
deep space habitat project team at Johnson, which is part of NASA's 
Advanced Exploration Systems Program. The goal of for the X-Hab 
Challenge is to help NASA inspire the STEM workforce of the future 
and the next generation of explorers. Winners will receive between 
$10,000 and $49,000 to produce functional products based on their 
designs. Proposals are due May 2, 2012, and awardees should expect to 
deliver their product to Johnson in May or June 2013.