Jordan's Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah posted to social media on Wednesday, congratulating the two young Jordanian winners of the NASA Europa Challenge.
"Proud of young innovators like Khaled and Farah," the crown prince said in his Instagram post.
Farah Salah, a Princess Sumaya University graduate, and Khalid Al Sharif, a graduate of the University of Jordan, won the competition for their World Weather application. Both of the young innovators were part of the Crown Prince Foundation's NASA internship program, according to Crown Prince Hussein.
The app is a "3D/4D web app for interactive display of spatial data, typically satellite data, oriented to deliver weather and climate data," according to the Jordan News Agency.
The two Jordanians aren't the first Arab youth to impress NASA.
In May, Saudi student Sara Alrabiah> won NASA's top award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The young student received the award for a project focused on "improving resistive RAMs’ performance by using single crystal Perovskites."
Relatedly,> Lebanese astronomer George Helou was instrumental in helping NASA discover the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star, announced in February. >Trappist-1, as the system was dubbed, is located 39.5 light-years from the Sun.
Enthusiasm for space exploration is definitely on the rise across the Arab world, with the UAE planning to send a spacecraft to explore Mars in 2020 and to >build a city on the Red Planet by 2117.
Perhaps the budding Jordanian innovators Salah and Al Sharif will go on to aid the UAE and NASA in future space exploration endeavors.