Team Galaxy, comprised of students from Baltimore and Montgomery counties, secured third place honors in the 2025–2026 NASA Dream With Us Design Challenge.
The team is led by Lucas Chen, a Grade 10 student at Eastern Tech High School.
Team members include Samarth Gomatam, Andy Yan, and Skyler Zeng, Grade 10 students at Dulaney High School, as well as two Grade 9 students from Montgomery County (Aric Deng of Damascus High School and Ruichen Feng of Thomas Wootton High School).
Team Galaxy is the first team from Maryland to earn honors in the prestigious national aerospace competition.
The NASA Dream With Us Challenge tasked students across the nation with designing innovative, autonomous drone systems to solve critical challenges in the agricultural industry.
Team Galaxy developed the “TG-1” – an advanced, AI-powered Vertical Take-Off and Landing drone designed to combat the soybean pest complex.
“What makes this victory so remarkable is not just the technology, but the collaboration,” said Frank Chen, team coach and faculty member at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School.
“They overcame geographical barriers, coordinating across four different Maryland high schools, to build a solution that could mean billions in annual savings for farmers nationwide.”
Competing for the first time, Team Galaxy distinguished itself by consulting directly with agricultural extension agents, precision agriculture specialists, and engineering professors.
Their winning submission featured a novel “periscope” sensor design capable of penetrating closed crop canopies and an onboard AI system to detect hidden pests, reducing field sampling time by 80% and chemical usage by up to 60%.
Building on this momentum, Team Galaxy’s research on the TG-1 system was recently featured as a poster presentation at the inaugural Asian American Scholar Forum AIX Summit, held in April in New
York.
The team was honored with a travel grant award for their poster.
Team Galaxy is currently designing a new “Innovation Program” aimed at sharing their engineering blueprint with other schools.