Kealakehe students earn Maunakea Scholars awards for telescope research

Eight Kealakehe High School students earned Maunakea Scholars awards, giving West Hawaii teenagers a chance to do original research with telescope time on Maunakea, one of the most competitive science opportunities available to public school students on Hawaii Island.

The honors came as the program marked its 10th anniversary in the 2025-2026 school year. Across the statewide cohort, 50 students from five Hawaii high schools were recognized, with 36 students awarded telescope time and additional students receiving honorable mentions. Waiākea High School in Hilo was also represented, putting Big Island students from both the east and west sides into the same research pipeline.

For Kealakehe junior Kailee Arakawa, the award supports a project titled Looking for GJ 436c. Her work focuses on the GJ 436 system, where NASA describes GJ 436 b as a Neptune-like exoplanet with a mass of 22.1 Earths, a 2.6-day orbit and a 2004 discovery date. The NASA Exoplanet Archive lists it as a confirmed planet and continues to include references that show the system remains an active target for study.

Fellow Kealakehe student Reina Wolcott was selected for a proposal called Countdown to Collapse, reflecting the range of questions students are being trusted to pursue. The program does more than reward grades. It asks students to identify a scientific problem, build a proposal and compete for access to observatory instruments that normally sit far beyond the reach of teenagers.

Maunakea Scholars launched in the 2015-2016 school year and grew from two inaugural schools in 2015 to five Hawaii high schools in 2016. That early expansion included Waiākea, Honokaa, Kapolei, Kalani and Nānākuli, alongside observatory partners such as the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, Gemini Observatory, James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, Subaru Telescope and UH’s ROBO-AO. Since then, the program says it has reached more than 1,000 student participants from more than 10 high schools across six Hawaiian Islands, and has awarded telescope time to more than 300 students.

That reach matters on an island where astronomy is part of the landscape and the economy, but not always an obvious path for local students. By putting Kealakehe and Waiākea students in the same cohort as peers from Oahu, Maunakea Scholars turns the mountain into a classroom and shows Big Island students that research on Maunakea is not reserved for outsiders or graduate students. It is a doorway into STEM, one proposal at a time.