Teenage girls successfully built the first satellite for Africa

In May Africa will launch its first private satellite into space to track the changing weather and climate of the entire continent. A special feature of this satellite is the product made by a group of 14 teenage girls from South Africa.

This young group is part of a training project that promotes science, technology, technology and math thinking skills (STEM) for high school students.

STEM is a training program that is being replicated in the world.

The group designed and built all satellites with the ability to fly around the Earth and record the thermal image of the surface of Africa twice a day to contribute to natural disaster prevention and security. real on the area.

"We are trying to find the core issues that Africa faces to solve them," Brittany Bull, a member of a group of students from Pelican Park, South Africa, told CNN.

"We can grow more food crops and crops in the right areas and monitor remote areas more easily. In addition to natural disasters such as wildfires and floods. . will be warned sooner to minimize the maximum damage " - Brittany added.

Satellite will provide more valuable data for the development of Africa.

Satellite has been acquired by the Meta Economic Development Organization (MEDO), a South African organization. Practitioners were sent to intensive training at Cape Peninsula Technical University, South Africa.

During the initial training sessions, the girls were instructed to program and test smaller satellite devices with weather balloons. Until the start of the big project was a real satellite, the young girls showed high thinking and technical ability to create a complete satellite with all the expected features.

"In South Africa, we have experienced terrible and terrible floods with heavy devastation so I hope that we will receive good signals from the satellite to be able to control everything. Better "- Sesam Mngqengqiswa from Philippi High School shared with CNN.

Mngqengqiswa (Middle) with Ayesha Salie (Left) and Bhanekazi Tandwa (Right).

If nothing changes, the satellite will be put into orbit in May 2017 and become Africa's first private satellite.

The program is also planning to expand the scope for girls from Namibia, Malawi, Kenya and Rwanda to have the opportunity to participate in the STEM training project . Many girls have daring ideas and turn them into reality like making satellites this time, something no one has ever thought of.

"Exploring the space and tracking the Earth from satellites is a job that many Africans can or dare to think about. So we want to show the world how great the potential of Africa is and Mngqengqiswa proudly shared with CNN that all things around us are possible .