NASA rewards Mexican student

Oaxaca.- Jonathan Sánchez, a student in aeronautical engineering at the Hidalgo Metropolitan Polytechnic University and living in Tultepec, won second place in NASA's Resistant Fugitive Materials Development Competition.

The 20-year-old competed with 40 other students from around the world. With his Spanish and Ecuadorian students, he managed to apply his project in the future to the International Space Station.

His team project involves nanocarbon tubes, focused on ferries and mission-based in the Hubble telescope.

The material they have experimented with qualitatively is resistant to thermal properties, solar cosmic properties and ultraviolet rays, as well as to atomic oxygen.

"(NASA specialists) have asked us to provide them with some kind of material that has not been tested, even in the module, and that has these capabilities to withstand.

"I could say that by sending missions and missions to cover the material that Hubble is made with, they were spending and spending and the material structure was improving," Jonathan told REFORM. .

NASA awarded only the first two places, where the student team from Hungary and the US Union took first place.

The prototypes in which he participated are one-inch structures and resistant to thermal temperatures.

"With nanotubes, it tries to cover what would be the material and protect it, it is a composite material that contains fibers and resins so that it has better properties.

"I used the mathematical model, they liked it too, to determine how the material will behave in space and how many atoms per centimeter it would have, and how it would degrade itself." ", did he declare.

Its price will be that NASA sends the project in space, whose cost per gram is about $ 10,000. And the total material that they have composed is about 5 grams.

In addition, the Mexican student was invited to participate in another competition at the NASA Propulsion Center in Alabama.

Jonathan recently spent a week in Texas. Traveling to the United States was obtained through sponsorships, the lottery of personal items and even a loan of 20,000 pesos that he received from the Polytechnic University of Hidalgo where he studied.

"Last year was the draw of the Vochito, this year was the Xbox One S, just keep selling tickets because a lot of people still send the message of" hey, I want to buy a ticket, you're really become an admiration for my kids, he explained.