Out of the 6 regional winners, one winner in the 17-18 year old category is Bangalore’s 18 year old Sachin Kukke from BMS College of Engineering. His winning experiment was based on Ferrofluid and aims to measure the thermal conductivity of ferrofluids in microgravity.
“We’re very excited to announce ‘Sachin Kukke’ as the regional winner from India. YouTube Spacelab in association with Lenovo saw participation from over 80 countries with the highest (40 percent) entries coming from India. We want to thank and congratulate all the winners, including the 9 Indian winners whose experiments were shortlisted in the top 60. Through initiatives like these, we want students to get inspired and explore the wonders of science and technology.” said, Nikhil Rungta, Country Marketing Head, Google India.
Sachin Kukke the Indian winner from APAC region, said, “This is like a dream come true, I had never ever imagined that I would get to experience zero gravity in my life. I had hopes of making it to the final six but I was not so sure. I am very excited to win this and I am really looking forward to meeting the other finalists and experiencing the Zero gravity flight.”
The six regional winners, who hail from Egypt, India, New Zealand, Spain, and the U.S., are:
14 - 16 year olds:
Patrick Zeng & Derek Chan, New Zealand (Asia Pacific region)
Laura Calvo & María Vilas, Spain (Europe, Middle East and Africa region)
Dorothy Chen & Sara Ma, U.S. (The Americas region)
17 - 18 year olds:
Sachin Kukke, Bangalore, India (Asia Pacific region)
Amr Mohamed, Egypt (Europe, Middle East and Africa region)
Emerald Bresnahan, U.S. (The Americas region)
The six regional winning teams will visit Washington DC in March for a series of activities and events to honor their achievements, including a ZERO-G Flight, a Lenovo IdeaPad U300s Ultrabook™, a special tour and dinner at the Udvar-Hazy Air & Space Museum at Dulles, and an awards ceremony at the Newseum on March 22. The two global winners (one team from each of the two age groups) will be announced at the awards ceremony on March 22, and will later this year have their experiments performed 250 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and live streamed on YouTube as part of a global event celebrating science and space.
In addition, the two global winners will get to choose a unique space experience: a trip to Japan to watch their experiment blast off in a rocket bound for the ISS, or once they are 18-years old, a one-of-a-kind astronaut training experience in Star City, Russia, the training center for Russian cosmonauts.
"This grand project demonstrates that math and science matter,” said Zahaan Bharmal, Google’s Head of Marketing Operations, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and the man behind the idea of Space Lab. “These six winners represent the next generation of scientists and even space explorers. Their families, schools, local communities and countries should be very proud.”
"An India finalist in the Global YouTube Spacelab science competition indicates the zest with which Indians foster their passion for science" says Shailendra Katyal, Director, Marketing, Lenovo India. "We believe competitions like our partnership with YouTube Space Lab provides students with an opportunity to consider science as a career aspiration. We congratulate all the 6 finalists and wish them luck, may the best one win."
In October 2011, YouTube invited budding scientists in two age categories, 14-16 years old and 17-18 years old, either alone or in groups of up to three, to submit a YouTube video describing their experiment to YouTube.com/SpaceLab. The Space Lab channel itself, which serves as a launch pad for discovering the best space and science videos on YouTube, has received more than 50 million combined video views worldwide throughout the course of the competition.
Over 150,000 YouTube users worldwide helped determine the six regional winners by voting for their favorite experiment. The YouTube community casted votes alongside our prestigious panel of judges, including NASA’s Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s Associate Administrator of Education and former Astronaut Leland Melvin, ESA Astronaut Frank De Winne, JAXA Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide and Cirque du Soleil’s founder Guy Laliberté.
For more information, please visit youtube.com/spacelab.
About YouTube
YouTube is the world’s largest online video community, allowing millions of people to discover, watch, and share original videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original-content creators and advertisers large and small. YouTube, LLC, is based in San Bruno, California, and is a subsidiary of Google Inc.
About Space Adventures
Space Adventures, the company that organized the flights for the world's first private space explorers, is headquartered in Vienna, Va., with an office in Moscow. It offers a variety of programs such as the availability today for spaceflight missions to the International Space Station and around the moon, Zero-Gravity flights, cosmonaut training, spaceflight qualification programs and reservations on future suborbital spacecraft. The company's advisory board includes Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, Shuttle astronauts Sam Durrance, Tom Jones, Byron Lichtenberg, Norm Thagard, Kathy Thornton, Pierre Thuot, Charles Walker, and Skylab/Shuttle astronaut Owen Garriott. For more information, please visit www.spaceadventures.com.
Sourced From: Perfect Relations PR
