"A team of eight Dartmouth students was one of five finalists for NASA’s Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-Changing Idea Challenge, a competition that invites both undergraduate and graduate student teams to create aerospace design projects to solve real-world problems," writes The Dartmouth. "The Team Dartmouth members — Thayer School of Engineering students David Dick TH, Alexa Escalona TH, Grace Genszler TH, Thomas Hodsden TH, Peter Mahoney ’19, Morgan McGonagle TH, Zoe Rivas TH and Christopher Yu ’19 — aimed to create a greenhouse that would support a crew of four for a 600 Martian-day mission on Mars. The team will be representing the College during the second round of the competition at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA on April 23 and 24.

"The eight students met in ENGS 89, 'Engineering Design Methodology and Project Completion' and ENGS 90, 'Engineering Design Methodology and Project Initiation,' which are taught together as a two-term engineering design sequence in which students work on projects as teams. Professor of engineering Benoit Cushman-Roisin, who serves as a faculty advisor for the team, said that the timing of NASA’s video submission deadline — which coincided with the students’ time in ENGS 90 — increased the students’ excitement for the challenge. He added that the leadership of Yu and Escalona catalyzed the eight students’ work together."