Franklin Regional team selected as one of top 18 in country for NASA's WEAR Challenge

A team of five Franklin Regional Middle School students, led by husband and wife teachers Arthur and Sarah Danny, were selected for phase two of NASA’s WEAR Challenge, in which students must design either a garment or helmet as radiation protection for astronauts on deep space missions.

If the team is one of around five picked from phase two, they will win an all-expenses paid trip to the Langley Research Center in Virginia, where they will present their prototype to NASA astronauts and engineers.

Arthur Danny, a science teacher at Franklin Regional Middle School, said of the 18 teams selected from the 66 total design entries across the country for phase one, Franklin Regional is the only one from Pennsylvania.

“They’ve been very patient and determined to find a vest that can protect the astronauts from the ionizing particles,” Danny said. “All of the group members have a skill or talent to bring to the group. It’s really neat to see their different strengths as they work.”

Sarah Danny, the team’s second sponsor and also a science teacher at Franklin Regional Middle School, said the engineering design skills the students learned will better prepare them for college and the workforce.

“These students that are working on the NASA WEAR competition are able to not miss a beat with their hard work and have developed technical skills that are not typical to master until well into college or career by adults,” she said. “They were able to take a method that is widely used in real-world problem-solving scenarios and apply it to their own, true real-world problem.”

Phase one of the WEAR Challenge tasked students with designing either a garment or helmet, and phase two tasks students with creating a prototype of the design and promotional video of the product.

Arthur Danny said when he first came across the competition, he offered it as an enrichment project that students couldwork on during lunch or before school.

Franklin Regional Middle School’s team, made up of four seventh-graders and one ninth-grader, decided to design a space vest for the competition.

Ariana Aranovich, member of the team and a seventh-grader at Franklin Regional, said five teams will be selected from the garment category and five from the helmet category.

The vest Aranovich and her team members designed gains more points if it’s multipurpose and needs to be less than 50 pounds.

“The outside is polyester and is soaked in sodium hydroxide to decrease the weight of the suit, and the inside is bamboo fabric,” Aranovich said. “We did put a water pouch on the vest … to protect the heart from radiation.”

Arthur Danny said the lightness of their vest’s design was a “key component” of why Franklin’s team was selected to build their prototype in phase two.

The team has been working remotely to perfect their design. They met for the first time in-person last week to start assembling it.

“I’ve liked how we get to work with everybody,” Aranovich said. “It’s been nice to figure out how to work without being in-person.”

Aranovich and her team had the opportunity to speak with two NASA astronauts virtually about their vest’s design.

Mike Foreman, a former NASA astronaut of 17 years who traveled to the International Space Station twice, helped with the vest’s design.

“I told them to not only make the vest comfortable but make it so that the astronauts want to wear it,” Foreman said. “They were very sharp and asked a lot of good questions.”

Foreman said that in space, everything floats around for at least 30 seconds before items are pushed away by air currents and get lost. That’s why he suggested the pouch to put a drink bag in.

“While you’re floating around, it’s a very dehydrating place,” Foreman said. “Orbiting the Earth and getting to look back at the Earth from space is just incredible. You really need to see it with your own eyes.”

Foreman said he enjoyed talking to the kids on Franklin Regional’s team.

The competition ends Aug. 12, and the team will hear soon after that if they were selected as one of the five garment teams. The trip to Virginia would take place in October.

“It’s irrelevant if they win or lose,” Arthur Danny said. “They already have won because they’ve worked so hard as a team, and they’ve gotten skills that will forever be valuable to them.”

According to a statement, NASA’s Artemis program will land the first woman and next man on the moon by 2024 and establish sustainable lunar exploration with NASA’s commercial and international partners by 2028 with the help of designs from the WEAR Challenge.