District students’ proposal will be on board Space X craft
Fifth-grade students at Winter-Walker Elementary School in the Wayne-Westland Community Schools district are over the moon after learning a recent class project will be an experiment on the International Space Station.
Students worked for several weeks designing and testing microgravity experiments for the 2022 Student Spaceflight Experiments Program Mission 17 to the International Space Station. Students from Adams Middle School, Franklin Middle School, John Glenn High School and Stevenson Middle School also worked on the design project, but the program prepared by Winter-Walker students will be the first from the district to be flown to the space station.
After nine weeks of research, experiment design, and proposal writing, a national panel of experts selected the Winter-Walker proposal to be on board an outgoing SpaceX spacecraft. The students' work will spend a few weeks on board the ISS after blasting off from Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The team created a project centered around cultivating lion's mane mushrooms in space and the project is currently undergoing the optimization process. The experiment is tentatively set to go to space in June and will spend four to six weeks aboard the ISS, where astronauts will follow instructions provided by the student team to complete the investigation in space. Then, the results will be returned to Earth, and the students will compare those that went into space with identical samples that stayed on Earth.
Students in grades K-12 will also have the opportunity to design a piece of art commemorating Wayne-Westland Community Schools SSEP Mission 17 experience, and one winning patch from grades K-5 and one patch from grades 6-12 will be selected to accompany the Winter-Walker Elementary experiment to the ISS. The two winning mission patches will spend four to six weeks on the ISS and then be returned to the students embossed as “flown in space.”
The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program 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.
