MARS — The Mars New Year event in May will feature new exhibits that demonstrate the brainpower and creativity of area secondary students.

Students in grades nine through 12 from any school district, cyber school or home school can enter the Meet The MARS Challenge! program.

The program presents a hypothetical situation in which 100 people are traveling to the Red Planet to live. The students must come up with problems, issues or challenges they would face and create a solution.

Shelly Watson, the Mars New Year committee member who is chairman of the project, said officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who partnered with the committee for the first Mars New Year were thrilled with the event and asked to continue the partnership.

The committee suggested reaching out to more students for the second Mars New Year, and created Meet The MARS Challenge! based on a science fair model.

Watson explained that each entry must include an exhibit to display at the Woodland Valley Church, which was once Mars High School.

The exhibits will be open to the public during Mars New Year, which will be May 4 to 6.

Watson said students can enter in four categories, which make up the “MARS” part of the project’s name. Those categories are mechanical, agricultural, relationships and survival.

She said $12,000 in prize money will be awarded to the top three winners in each category. First place winners will receive $1,500 each, second place $1,000 and third place $500.

Watson has been in touch with 12 school districts in the area but stressed that all students in grades nine through 12 are welcome to enter the contest.

She also emphasized that even projects that have creative problems or challenges for which no solutions have been found can be entered. The judges understand that many dead ends must be experienced on the way to a solution.

“That’s OK,” Watson said. “Thomas Edison did over 1,000 experiments before he came up with the light bulb.”

One of the judges, Katie Beckwith, is a 2006 Mars High School graduate who now works as a launch manager in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The others are Mark Torgerson, Zane Frund, Roy Weitzell and Mark Campbell. They work for BASF, MSA, Chatham University and Cornell University, respectively.

Mars Mayor Gregg Hartung, whose idea it was to create a community event based on the planet Mars, said he is excited about the competition.

“It fits really well into what we originally had hoped for,” Hartung said. “We don’t want the event to be the typical festival, but want it focused on education and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math.)”

The cash awards for first, second and third place also please Hartung, as they could help the winners financially with their post-high school educations.

More information, including registration for the Meet The MARS Challenge!, is available at www.marsnewyear.com.