Cottonians win Nasa prize

Ten students from the school have bagged a prize at the International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) held last week.

In the competition, organised by Nasa on July 30, 31 and August 1 at the Johnson Space Center, Houston, USA, ten students from the school formed a team along with students from American, Romanian and British schools to design a hypothetical settlement on Mars’ surface. The groups were given 42 hours to design a base that could be used by humans to live in, with the requisite plans for growing food, providing housing, and protecting the population from natural disasters.

The ten students from Bishop Cotton are: Anil Agarwal, Aravind Sarangapaani, Debraun Dhar, Isaac John, Janardhan Mahadev, Pranav Shankar, Shivam Gaur, Shubham Joshi, Srikant Salecha, and Tejas V Rai.

The students, in an interaction with the press, detailed the gruesome schedule that they subjected themselves to. “We literally did not sleep through the competition,” said Isaac John. To qualify for the international finals, the school first won the national round for designing a settlement, this time on an asteroid. There was an Asian level playoff, where three schools -- Cotton, a Kolkata school, and a Pakistan school -- participated at Gurgaon.

Cotton and the Pakistan school made it to the final round at Houston.

Principal John K Zachariah said that he was extremely proud of his students. “This is the first time any school in India has achieved this. I have received several accolades from Cottonians across the world. One person said that this was the best achievement in the last 140 years of the school,” he said.