Hi I am Peter Cullen, the voice of OPTIMUS PRIME.
I’m here today at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center with the next
generation of engineers.
The winning teams for the 2017 NASA
OPTIMUS PRIME Spinoff Promotion
and Research Challenge,
otherwise known as NASA OPSPARC.
These young creative minds took NASA technology
and were able to use it to solve different problems
and find solutions that can help all humankind.
Hi, I’m Nick, I'm Erik, I'm Atherton, and I'm Hays
We're from the Baylor School in Chattanooga, TN.
We used the microshutter array technology
from the James Webb Space Telescope
and combined it with fiber optic cables to create faster
and cheaper communication routes.
Now guys your team competed against many high
school students all over the United States but
first of all, congratulations guys, but I have a question.
How did you come up with your idea?
As we mentioned before, we are from Chattanooga, Tennessee
an innovative city with gigabit internet.
In order to keep up with this trend of big data, we foresaw the need
to improve current fiber optic systems.
Our preliminary research gave us a general understanding of
how fiber optic systems work.
We accessed publicly available NASA resources
in order to understand how microshutter arrays work.
Having done our research
we made a rough digital model to bring our idea to life
and to bring the initial concept to life.
We created a glog or a digital poster.
We heard we were selected to
move on to the next round, where we entered the
NIA Universe Virtual World Space to create
3D models of the design with the help of our
college mentor.
Now you can come up with own cool solution.
So join us for next years OPSPARC Challenge,
where creativity and technology come together and
new ideas are formed.
Be the spark, join OPSPARC