Students reaching for the stars in Russell County

From TriCities.com: Students reaching for the stars in Russell County

Reaching for the stars has a whole new meaning for students in Russell County.

The county has been selected as one of 11 communities in the country – and the first in Virginia – to participate in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program Mission 2, and send an experiment into space.

Students will compete to design the experiment, which will be conducted on the International Space Station later this year.

“It’ll be a challenge to students,” said Jane Carter, a Lebanon High School chemistry and physics teacher who is co-directing the program with Scotty Fletcher, secondary supervisor for Russell County Public Schools. “It’s a microgravity environment -- no up, no down. What would intrigue you [students] about that type of environment?”

Students between fifth and 12th grades can submit experiment ideas, either individually or in a team of six, she said. Three projects will be chosen from the applicants locally, and then a national panel will choose one project that will be sent into space, Carter said.

“It’s like real-world science in that there’s a proposal process,” she said.

The experiment will be designed by the winning team of students, who will be called principal investigators, like real scientists are, Carter said. The school system received five mini-labs, and one of those labs, with the student experiment, will be sent into space to conduct the experiment while the other four will carry out the same experiment here on earth. That will give the student experimenters an opportunity to see if their experiment was affected by the microgravity environment on the space station.

“It’s a whole different ballgame for them to look at science like this,” Carter said. “You just never know – if [you] can eliminate gravity, can that answer some problem here on earth that we need an answer to?”

The project is a costly one, as the county had to get sponsors to pay for the experiment material, as well as to figure out how to get the experiments to the space station, now that the NASA shuttle program has ended, Carter said. She said likely, a private company’s space vehicle will ferry the project into orbit to dock at the International Space Station.

In addition to designing experiments, students who are in prekindergarten through 12th grade can design paper patches to be sent into space along with their projects, Carter said.

“It will try to convey the community,” she said of the patches’ designs. “Hopefully, we’ll make it into something students can keep.”

Fletcher said he thinks the opportunity to participate in the nationwide project is a practical chance for students to dig into science.

“It should inject some interest into science and the classroom in general,” he said. “There’s been an end of an era with space exploration, but space is always that frontier to a child – the great beyond. It doesn’t matter what my generation has done.”

Carter said the experiments will encourage the students to think about what’s in space.

“From the standpoint of those areas we have left to go and explore, that’s the big one – space,” Carter said. “I think it’s exciting to [students] because we don’t know all the answers – there are things for them to wonder about. [There is a] frontier that’s still there to be explored.”