A ninth standard student Ashwini Patankar from Swami Vivekananda school, Chembur won the first prize in the ISRO’s ‘Water Rocket Making and Launching Competition’ here on Friday.
The competition is one of the “outreach” programmes of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) to popularise space and rocket sciences. This is the first time it has been held in Mumbai. The second prize was bagged by Sanket Joglekar of IES Modern English School and third prize by Tushar Sawant of St Xavier school in Borivili.
The winners received Rs 2000, 1500 and 1000 respectively from ISRO. There were three consolation prizes of Rs 500 each. Typically, a water rocket can travel up to a distance of about 300 feet and to a height of 50-75 feet, B R Guruprasad in-charge of the programme said. Today’s maximum was around 250 feet but many of them could make their water rocket travel up to 180 ft.
The competition brought out the engineering skills in them and some even showed innovations in the ISRO’s design model taught to them. It was very satisfying, he said. “The experience of building water rockets makes the students understand the basics of rocket propulsion as well as nuances involved in a simple model rocket construction,” Guruprasad said.
Such a competition was first held in Bangalore in 2007. This is the second such competition on water rockets that was held in Mumbai, S Satish, an official from ISRO said. “We jointly organised the event with the Nehru Planetarium and are planning to organise several such events in various states to enthuse students in rocket and propulsion science,” he said. There were 98 ninth standard students selected from schools across Mumbai and out of them 27 were selected for finals, Satish said.
Water rockets are model rockets that can be built from empty pressurised soft drinks plastic bottles, plastic and PVC sheets as well as a few stationery items, Guruprasad said. These rockets are then filled with water, pressurised using a pump, and launched using a spring loaded simple rocket launcher, he said. Building and launching water rocket provides the exciting experience for high school students, said Planetarium director Piyush Pandey.
