SNOHOMISH—Valley View Middle School student, 8th-grader Maggie Hou, is one of three winners of NASA’s 2024-2025 Explore Writing Challenge – an essay competition for K-12 students on how radioisotope power systems can enable space travel.

This year’s essay competition asked students to learn about NASA’s radioisotope power systems (RPS), which are like nuclear batteries and have been used by the space agency to discover moonquakes on Earth’s Moon as well as explore more than 891 moons on the solar system. Students were then tasked to write, in 275 words or less, a unique exploration mission to one of these moons using RPS.

“I’m so impressed by the creativity and knowledge of our Power to Explore winners,” said Carl Sandifer II, program manager of the Radioisotope Power Systems Program at

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