Turkish students to debut rockets in NASA competition

Engineering students from the Middle East Technical University (METU), Çankaya and Başkent universities will represent Turkey at the CanSat Competition, a design-build-launch competition for space-related topics which is organized by the American Astronautical Society (AAS) and Lockheed Martin, and supported by NASA.

The students will compete with other teams from 40 universities around the world and fire their rockets designed especially for the competition to the sky in the U.S. state of Texas.

The Team CanBee, which is composed of engineering students from Çankaya University managed to rank 14th among 100 universities and will have a chance to prove themselves at the competition.

Speaking to an Anadolu Agency (AA) correspondent, team leader Sühan Mergen said they have been preparing for the competition for the last six months. "There is not a big economic win out of this competition but it is certainly prestigious," Mergen added.

METU's Göksat Space Team, composed of both graduate and undergraduate students, aims to launch their own satellite one day to the skies but first, they have fixed their eyes on the competition. Team leader Mücahit Taşdemir said, "We are determined to bring first place to Turkey and continue our preparations and are highly motivated."

Team Parsy-Can of Başkent University has come a long way since it was first founded in 2017. The team came in fourth place at the TÜRKSAT Model Satellite Competition in 2017 and claimed the third place at last year's TEKNOFEST. This year, the team wants to make an international breakthrough.

The world's most prestigious model satellite competition CanSat is scheduled to take place between June 14-16 and 40 universities from around the world will compete for first place.