St Dominic's Duo Reaching for the Stars
This year two students from our school, Alecia Dibu and Alison Koci, were chosen to be part of a team of students representing Ireland in the prestigious NASA/ NSS Ames Space Settlement Contest. This is an international space science competition aimed at challenging students to design an off-world space settlement capable of sustaining a population of over 10,000 people, whilst creating an Earth-like environment.
Our Fifth Year biology and chemistry students Alecia and Alison titled their project “Danú”. Danú is a goddess from ancient Irish Mythology who personifies nature, wisdom, strength and fertility. The students designed a settlement which will not only provide a sustainable and safe place for humans to live, but which will also protect Earth from the enhanced greenhouse effect.
Their conceptual design places a half-cut rotating torus protected by a temporary sunshade, proposed to control the amount of light hitting the earth. The residents of Danú will access resources through the biomining of asteroids and will be bioengineered to allow them to live a healthy life on the colony, despite the otherwise dangerous hazards of space life.
The community at St. Dominic’s are very proud of the concept that our students have researched, designed and developed over this past year. Some of the innovative concepts in our project were inspired by the entries in our Science week competition “Human?” in which Junior students from our school offered forward their ideas on what life could be like for humans living on a space colony.
Two of the winners of this competition, Lama Elghobashy and Nia Neju, also contributed to our submission with detailed artistic conceptions; their drawings helped to bring the theory in the project to life on the page!
We were delighted when we heard the news that Alison and Alecia were to be invited to present their project at the International Space Development Conference (ISDC) in Los Angeles from May 23rd to May 26th, 2024. We were so proud that Alecia and Alison would be representing Ireland in this fabulous international stem competition; they hoped to use this opportunity to promote women in STEM and to lead the way for other students to follow in their footsteps.
This was an incredible opportunity for our two students and fundraising soon began to allow Alison and Alecia and their NASA team mentors, Ms. Dockery and Ms. Healy, to attend this most prestigious competition. The school community have been so supportive of our fundraising efforts, including a bake sale and a go fund me page! We would like to thank Ms. Cameron, the Board of Management, the staff and all the students at St. Dominic’s College for their help with our fundraising efforts. We would like to thank the Parents Association, the Dominican Sisters, our Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Montemayor for their support and also to the community of parents, local representatives (Leo Varadkar, Roderic O’Gorman, Cieran Perry, Séamus Mc Grattan, Eimer Mc Cormack) and businesses who have made donations to our project fund.
Finally, we would like to thank our commercial project sponsors …
