A Bay company's cow mascot heading to space on World Earth Day on Monday is giving local students a chance to win their school a high-powered solar telescope.

Enternet Online's toy cow mascot ‘Eva' is currently in the United States being prepped to be launched into space, after the company won a worldwide bid to send an object on a spaceweather.com expedition.

Eva the space cow

Now Bay students have the chance to win themselves an android tablet and their school the telescope if they leap beyond the stratosphere in putting together something that creatively capture's Eva special moment.

The expedition is led by space weather scientist Dr Tony Phillips, who has been working with Earth to Sky Calculus in California to send specially designed balloons to the edge of space.

EVA will be attached to the balloon capsule and the entire 2-3 hour flight will be videoed. Once the capsule returns to earth, a tracking device will allow the mission controllers to retrieve the capsule and scientific data – and EVA will be safely returned home to Tauranga again with TNT Express special services.

The cow left the Bay for the states earlier this month, adorned with Tauranga Mayor Stuart Crosby's Tauranga City lapel pin and a badge from Western Bay Mayor Ross Paterson, and is in the hands of high school students in the small town of Bishop.

EOL's managing director Terry Coles hopes his company's school competition will promote Monday's World Earth Day – a worldwide event aimed at personalizing the massive challenge of climate change around the globe.

'The students can send us a poem, story, picture, video, power point presentation – anything, as long as it's creative,” says Terry.

The prize for the winning school is a high-powered solar telescope capable of seeing sun spots, solar flares and eclipses – likely be a one of a kind in this country.

'I would imagine the winning school would be the only one in New Zealand with one of these, and with solar MAX (high sunspot and solar flare activity) in progress for the next two years it would be pretty special for that school and their students to be able to view this,” says Terry.

'We spent a bit of time researching the best telescope to get so that the winning school would have an amazing piece of technology at their fingertips.”

The solar telescope is fitted with a special solar filter for safely observing sunspots, solar flares and eclipses. The filter can also be removed for use with night time astronomy.

EOL sourced the high powered solar telescope from the United States and chose the model on the recommendation of Dr Tony Phillips.

Terry says the competition is a fun and educational product for local students to get involved in.

'We are very proactive in supporting our community so we saw this as a great opportunity to encourage local students to learn more about World Earth Day and EVA's journey to the edge of space as it's a first for the Bay.”

EOL is also donating two android tablets and cases, worth $420 each, to two of the most creative entries from the students: one for a student aged 10 or under, and the second for a student aged 11 or over.

A judging panel will select the android winners and the winning school will be randomly drawn from all entries received.

The competition is open until May 22 with student project sheets and entry forms available at: www.eol.co.nz/eva.