Event Year: 2024
Event Location: Cocoa-FL
Competition: Junior Solar Sprint
Division: 4-6 (JSS Green)
School: Buck Lake Elementary
Team Name: The Galaxy Gals
Project Name: The Solar System
Team Size: 3

The Team- Our team loves solar cars, and we all have had experience with them for 1 year, and we also have experience with solar ovens for 1 year. Our team members are Meryl, Daisy, and Tamara. We are all 4th graders at Buck Lake Elementary School. We use teamwork when we stick together and when things are hard, such as when the wheels were difficult to put on and stay on, we helped each other and now the wheels work well.

Meryl Daisy Tamara

Solar Panel Photos

Our Solar Car- Our solar car’s name is The Solar Star, because our theme is the galaxies, and we switched Car to Star. It runs with a solar panel connected to the generator, which makes the pulley rotate, so that the front wheels move. On our car, we have planets on the wheels for decoration. We put our passenger-Andromeda- in a rocket ship made out of cups to keep him safe. For our innovation we made our solar panel able to move so if the sun is more on the left we are able to move the solar panel to face the left where the sun is or the other way around, but if the sun is in the middle of the sky we are able to have the solar panel face straight up. Another innovation we have is our rocket that holds our ping-pong passenger, Andromeda, our rocket is made of two paper cups and one plastic cup we added flaps so our ping-pong passenger can easily be inserted and removed but still be safe inside our rocket.

Length	32 cm
Width	19 cm
Height	12 cm
Weight	293.6 g with battery pack
Solar Panel dimensions	33 cm Width: 11 cm
Rear wheel diameter	58 mm
Front wheel diameter	45 mm

Testing

Date	Distance	Time	Speed	Notes
2/29	8 m	8.93	0.11 m/sec	panel on the side
2/29	8 m	8.24	0.97 m/sec	panel on the top
3/20	8 m	12.25	0.65 m/sec	attached to the string
3/25	8 m	9.86	0.81 m/sec	our team recorded this run
3/25	8m	9.87	0.81 m/sec	realized string was rubbing and causing friction on the chassis

Fun Facts

• There are over 2 TRILLION galaxies

• The closet galaxy to the Milky Way Galaxy is Andromeda galaxy

• The oldest galaxy is Alcyoneus 

• One earth year is one light year