Harman Patil (Editor)

Student Spaceflight Experiments Program

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Established
  
June 2010

Head
  
Jeff Goldstein

Mission
  
STEM student outreach

Started
  
June 2010


Founder(s)
  
Jeff Goldstein, director, NCESSE

Key people
  
Stacy Hamel, National Program ManagerDrew Roman, Technology ManagerHarri Vanhala, Science AdvisorTim Livengood, Science AdvisorMichael Hulslander, Education Advisor

Student spaceflight experiments program day 1 intro


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.

Contents

Student spaceflight experiments program


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.

Student Spaceflight Experiments Program Logos and Banners SSEP Student Spaceflight Experiments Program

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.

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.

References

Student Spaceflight Experiments Program Wikipedia


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