Students throw raw egg 300 meters down and make it land whole

Throwing a raw egg 300 meters down and letting it land in one piece: two students from Nieuwe Veste secondary school in Coevorden succeeded. They won the national space competition with it.

The assignment was as follows: gently land a fragile piece of space debris so that it survives the fall. Technasium students Jesse Scherpen (17) and Timo Bruins (16) accepted the challenge. For months they worked on a design that should bring this assignment to a successful conclusion.

“We have made a paper mache return capsule,” says Bruins. “In a round shape, so that it experiences as little air resistance as possible during the fall.” The capsule contains cotton wool to protect the egg: crucial, as it turns out later today. “A drone dropper is attached to the drone,” continues Scherpen. “He holds a string that can be operated via the remote control.

At the back of a field of Nieuwe Veste, the men show how this process works. This time they release the capsule from thirty meters away. The thing makes a nice taste, and once down it turns out: egg is broken. “There weren’t enough cotton balls in it,” explains Scherpen with a laugh. Well, the two men have already won the prize anyway.

“It was fun,” Bruins looks back on the process, which lasted a year. “It also often didn’t work out, then the courage drops for a while. But in the end a very nice result came out. Nice to finish the Technasium in this way. With a competition that you have won.”

The competition was once created by Recyclevalley, to create awareness among Technasium students: students who, in their later life, will mainly focus on technical solutions and the so-called ‘circle of life’. The Intergalactic-Environmentalists Foundation took over the baton a few years ago, in collaboration with the Happy with an egg Foundation and the National Space Museum.

ttn-41