Students' experiments launch to International Space Station

 

A pair of experiments created at Red Hook High School are making their way to the International Space Station Monday.

When Mission 18 of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program launched Nov. 4, it was carrying both “The Effect of Microgravity on the Hatching Rate of Rotifers,” an experiment designed by four seniors for the mission, and “Examining Artemia Salina Hatching in the Presence of Microgravity,” which was originally planned as part of Mission 17.

The unique opportunity to have student-designed work executed by astronauts orbiting the planet is the product of the Red Hook Central School District taking part in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. The goal of the program, which the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education started in June 2010, is to give students the ability to design and propose real microgravity experiments to fly in low Earth orbit.

“It’s the application of scientific skills in a real-world situation, which gets students excited,” said Deborah Beam, the recently retired Red Hook High School science teacher who led the local application of the project since it began in June 2022.

More than just the handful of students who will see their work reach orbit, the program engaged hundreds of Red Hook students by inviting them to devise and submit possible experiments.

“It’s pretty remarkable, when you think about it,” said Giacomo Buitoni, one of four seniors, along with Ava Hubner, Emmy Nelson-Madore and Lotta Pflaum, who designed the Mission 18 experiment as juniors. “In school, you’re doing science from a young age. You’re always doing random experiments here and there, but you’re never doing real science. This is the kind of science that people actually listen to when you get the results back and conclusions are made and actions are taken around the world.”

To be included in a mission, school communities first submit an Implementation Plan that details how taking part would address a strategic need for STEM education, how its educators would engage the student population and how many students would take part. Once approved, the educators deliver a microgravity curriculum to the students, and groups work together to formulate specific experiments.

Teachers in each participating Red Hook class submitted the best experiments to a panel of teachers, who narrowed the list of candidates to three. After students used feedback from the teachers to sharpen their experiments, they were submitted to the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education’s National Step 2 Review Board, which selects the one from each school community that will take flight.

Each selected group is given a flight-certified, microgravity research mini-laboratory in which to include its experiment. The astronauts then execute the experiment on the space station and, at the same time, students execute the experiment on Earth.

The experiment picked for Mission 18, “The Effect of Microgravity on the Hatching Rate of Rotifers,” will compare how the zooplankton grow in microgravity versus the Earth’s gravity. The four students hypothesized “Rotifers will reproduce and develop more rapidly under microgravity than they will on Earth.” A fifth student, Rosa Hagan, is also helping with the packaging and execution of the experiments and science teacher Larra Agate has taken over for Beam as lead faculty advisor.

Equal samples of freeze-dried Rotifer eggs will be rehydrated in freshwater on both the ISS and on Earth, and a fixative will be combined with the eggs after a few days. The hatching rates of both groups will then be compared.

The students, in their proposal, noted the results could have applications in waste management of freshwater, “as these organisms can be used to prevent clouds of waste in water.”

The other experiment, “Examining Artemia Salina Hatching in the Presence of Microgravity,” was created by 2023 Red Hook graduates Jessica Amato, Zola Campisi, Avis Roszko, Raphael Senterfit-Sanjuan and Tucker Sheahan and was included when Mission 17 launched on Nov. 9, 2023. However, the experiment, which measures the hatching of brine shrimp – sea monkeys – in a similar fashion as the zooplankton, was scrapped after the test subjects were tainted in space. Subsequently, a reflight experiment was included on the list of experiments traveling in the Nov. 4 launch.

The five current students prepared and packaged both experiments.

Buitoni said his group had varied ideas for their experiment – making kombucha in space or letting milk sour among them – before being inspired by pond water on Nelson-Madore’s property to incorporate zooplankton.

“We did some research on what organisms may thrive in that environment and we had some guidance from Ms. Beam,” Nelson-Madore said.

Despite their similarities, the two Red Hook experiments were developed separately. Buitoni attributed it to “the osmosis of ideas.”

Nelson-Madore said running both the sea monkey and zooplankton experiments at the same time will add to the value of the results. “We’ll see if there’s any difference between the two typed of organisms under relatively similar conditions.”

In addition, with each mission, school communities are invited to design mission patches. At Red Hook, more than 200 students took part in a design contest for each missions 17 and 18. Taia Mokii, then a ninth-grade student, created the winning design for Mission 17, and November Koga, then a 10^th-grade student, had the favored patch for Mission 18.

In all, between 35 and 40 possible projects were created in Red Hook for each of the two missions.

The process of teaching the curriculum, creating project groups and finally submitting experiment ideas to the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, spans around three months.

“It takes a long time,” Beam said, “but the process of the science, the writing of the science, those are all immense skills that, at the end of this, you can’t ask for anything better.”

About SSEP

The Student Space Flight Experiments Program [or just “SSEP”] is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in the U.S. and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education Internationally. It is enabled through a strategic partnership with Nanoracks, LLC, which is working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of the International Space Station as a National Laboratory."