Former student visits during Science Week

On Tuesday, August 13, Narrabri West Public School had the chance to celebrate one of its incredible alumni.

As part of Science Week, the school had a visit from Warwick Penrose who is a former Narrabri West Public School student.

Warwick attended Narrabri West from 1978-1984.

Warwick’s company EPE provides a lot of robotic and autonomous systems to the Australian governments, as well as a host of other force protection capabilities.

EPE also leads a consortium which has a contract with the Australian Space Agency (ASA) to design a Lunar Rover that NASA will send to the moon in 2026/27.

This is under the Trailblazer Moon to Mars project.

As part of the agreement with the ASA is to conduct an outreach program to visit schools, universities, research agencies and industry partners to talk about this program and try and encourage students to take an interest in STEM.

Warwick and his team visited the school with one of the Lunar ROVER prototypes and discussed what the NASA Artemis mission is, what Australia’s role is within Artemis, and what the Lunar Rover they are contracted to design will be doing on the moon, and excitingly how we are going to build it and test ‘Roover’ in Australia.

The children had a chance to get ‘hands on’ with some of the robots and had a chance to have question time with Warwick and his team.

This was a wonderful opportunity for Stage 3 students and the school looks forward to Warwick and his team visiting again.