Out of This World Experiment Aims For Space Station

OCEAN CITY – On June 9, Dr. Kathleen Taylor, superintendent of the Ocean City School District proudly announced that a team of students at Ocean City High School had been awarded the opportunity to implement a science project that will be tested aboard the International Space Station this fall.
According to a news release, “Throughout the year, student teams researched possible topics of interest, formulated original hypotheses, and developed procedures that could test these hypotheses under the restrictions necessary to be conducted on the International Space Station. Students then wrote research proposals explaining their hypotheses and how they intended to test them.”
“Of the proposals submitted by Ocean City High School, Ocean City Intermediate School, and Upper Township Middle School, the top three were selected by a panel of judges and submitted for review at the national level. Topics ranged from blood coagulation, to the survivability of snails, to the attachment rate of bacteria. The winning proposal, which will actually be tested by astronauts aboard the International Space Station, will analyze the effect of microgravity on the attachment rate of E. coli bacteria to lettuce cells. The students who designed this experiment are: Lauren Bowersock, Mercy Griffith, Kristine Redmond, Daniel Loggi, Kaitland Wriggins and Alison Miles.”
Team members and faculty advisors gathered at the high school gathered June 13 to explain, “The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) is a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education program at the national level. The SSEP initiative invites the entire community to help its students develop their scientific knowledge in an authentic setting.”
Project Director Dan Weaver further explained that he and his co-director Dave Urich “provided students with some basic scientific principles that are integral to this particular project.” Microgravity and its’ effects on living organisms became the fundamental theme for the experiment; a topic that scientists have been studying for many years. “They have to design a research proposal in extreme depth,” Weaver stated. “They do all the research and come up with their own hypothesis.” He added that NASA insisted on strict size (8 centimeters) and weight limitations for the project’s journey into orbit, which represented a significant challenge to the student scientists.
Taylor stressed that this project was completed on the students’ own time, a real testament to their dedication to science and also the dedication to the commitment made by staff, notably the project facilitator Catherine Georges who worked with the teams on a daily basis to help mentor the students without becoming involved in the actual design and proposal document. Georges explained that she needed to maintain a distance so that the project was entirely a product of her student’s creativity and scientific knowledge. She acted as a “resource.”
Georges explained that the key to this experiment was to ensure that the space borne experiment was conducted concurrently with the same experiment on earth so that students could compare and contrast results, both in earth gravity and in the micro-gravity of space.
Bowersock explained that their challenges included making sure that all scientific variables were identified and duplicated exactly in space and on earth. “This was the hardest thing we had to do so that the lettuce was kept alive during the launch and travel to the ISS, and “we also worry that the e-coli will also survive.” Bowersock did stress that the e-coli used is not pathogenic and is completely safe to humans.
To contact Jim McCarty, email jmccarty@cmcherald.com.