Student Spaceflight Experiments Program

Student Spaceflight Experiments Program

Founders	Jeff Goldstein, director, NCESSE
Established	June 2010
Mission	STEM student outreach
Head	Jeff Goldstein
Key people	Stacy Hamel, Senior Flight Operations Manager John Hamel, Flight Operations Manager Kirsten Weimer, Education Program Coordinator Drew Roman, Technology Manager Harri Vanhala, Science Advisor Tim Livengood, Science Advisor Michael Hulslander, Education Advisor
Website	http://ssep.ncesse.org/

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP) provides an opportunity for student groups from upper elementary school through university to design and fly microgravity experiments in low Earth orbit (LEO). SSEP is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE, a project of the Tides Center), the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education, and the private space hardware company NanoRacks. SSEP operates under a Space Act Agreement between the sponsoring organizations and NASA, allowing the International Space Station (ISS) to be utilized as a national laboratory. It is a remarkable U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative that gives typically 300+ students across a participating community the ability to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit, first aboard the final flights of the Space Shuttle, and then on the International Space Station.

The program provides seamless integration across STEM disciplines through an authentic, high visibility research experience—an approach that embraces the Next Generation Science Standards. SSEP immerses hundreds of students at the local level in the research experience—students are truly given the ability to be real scientists and engineers.

Each community participating in SSEP conducts a local Flight Experiment Design Competition, with their student teams competing to fly an experiment in low Earth orbit in a real research mini-laboratory reserved just for their community. The competition is conducted through formal submission of real research proposals by the community’s student teams—just like professional researchers. Students can design experiments in diverse fields, including: seed germination, crystal growth, physiology and life cycles of microorganisms (e.g. bacteria), cell biology and growth, food studies, and studies of micro-aquatic life. Content resources for teachers and students support foundational instruction on science in microgravity and experiment design. A suite of SSEP program elements—the Community Program—leverages the flight experiment design competition to engage the entire community, embracing a Learning Community Model for STEM education. For school districts—even individual schools—SSEP provides an opportunity to implement a systemic, high caliber STEM education program tailored to community need.

SSEP is designed to inspire and engage America’s next generation of scientists and engineers, and it is accomplished by providing each participating community their own very real Space Program.

The program is open to 5 categories of community, which provides a great deal of flexibility in implementing SSEP at the local level:

• Pre-College (the core focus for SSEP) in the U.S., (grades 5-12), with a participating school district—even an individual school—providing a stunning, real, on-orbit RESEARCH opportunity to their upper elementary, middle, and high school students
• 2-Year Community Colleges in the U.S., (grades 13-14), where the student body is typically from the local community, providing wonderful pathways for community-wide engagement
• 4-Year Colleges and Universities in the U.S., (grades 13-16), with an emphasis on Minority-Serving Institutions, where the program fosters interdisciplinary collaboration across schools and departments, and an opportunity for formal workforce development for science majors
• Communities in the U.S. led by Informal Education or Out-of-School Organizations, (e.g., a museum or science center, a home school network, a boy scout troop), because high caliber STEM education programs must be accessible to organizations that promote effective learning beyond the traditional classroom
• Communities Internationally: in European Space Agency (ESA) member nations, European Union (EU) member nations, Canada, and Japan with participation through NCESSE’s Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education. Communities in other nations should explore the potential for their participation by contacting the Institute.

Critical Timeline of Activities:

Once a community joins the program, teachers can begin using SSEP-provided curriculum resources for classroom introduction on: 1) the nature of a microgravity environment, where the presence and effects of gravity appear to be absent, 2) the broad range of science that can be conducted in microgravity and why, which is one of the key motivations for constructing the International Space Station–America’s newest National Laboratory, and 3) the approach to designing microgravity experiments using the SSEP mini-laboratory. Student teams across the community then move on to experiment definition and design. Mirroring how professional research is done, teams write flight experiment proposals using a formal and grade level appropriate proposal guideline. The design competition—from program start, to experiment design, to submission of proposals by student teams—runs 9 weeks. The submitted proposals go through a 2-step proposal review process to select the flight experiment for the community. The flight experiment goes through a formal NASA flight safety review at Johnson Space Center, and is transported to ISS as part of an SSEP experiments payload.

Each SSEP Flight Opportunity has its own Critical Timeline which defines all milestones and deadlines.

History

The program was launched in June 2010, by NCESSE in the U.S. and by the Clarke Institute internationally. As of 2015, SSEP has sponsored eight missions to LEO – two on board the Space Shuttle, and six to the ISS – with a seventh mission to the ISS announced in April 2014, and expected to fly in the spring of 2015.

In the first eight SSEP flight opportunities, 48,900 students in grades 5 through 15 (junior undergraduate in the U.S. higher education system) participated in experiment design and proposal writing. Of 7,922 proposals received, a total of 114 experiments were selected for flight, with one from each community participating in each flight opportunity. As of 15 October 2014, 96 of these experiments have been successfully launched. The 18 experiments comprising Mission 6 to the ISS were lost when the Cygnus CRS Orb-3 vehicle exploded shortly after launch on 28 October 2014.

Key dates

Date	Event
Jun 1, 2010	Program start
May 16, 2011	STS-134 launch
Jul 8, 2011	STS-135 launch
May 22, 2012	M1 launch
Oct 7, 2012	M2 launch
Sep 18, 2013	M3a launch
Jan 9, 2014	M3b/M4 launch
Jul 13, 2014	M5 launch
Oct 28, 2014	M6 launch (Cygnus CRS Orb-3 failure)
Jan 10, 2015	M6 launch
Jun 28, 2015	M7 launch (SpaceX CRS-7 failure)
Apr 8, 2016	M7 launch
Jul 16, 2016	M8 launch (planned)

Process

The competition to select student projects for flight is designed to resemble a standard research proposal process. Interested groups must submit proposals in response to announced criteria; these proposals are then peer-reviewed against the criteria in a two-stage selection process, with the vast majority of proposals rejected.

Each selected experiment is provided with one mini-laboratory, which is flown on the ISS and then returned to Earth for analysis. Experiments selected for flight have included research into crystal growth, composting, cell division, seed germination, and calcium metabolism. The cost of each experiment is on the order of US$21,000, which must be raised by the community developing the experiment.

Students have an opportunity to share their research at a national conference sponsored by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, NCESSE, and the Clarke Institute. Students participating in the program have also been given the chance to participate in a videoconference with space station astronauts.

External links

• SSEP in the News
• SSEP In Our Own Words (Essays from SSEP participants)