With funding from the California Space Grant Consortium, Lincoln Middle School students have been given the opportunity to send a mini-laboratory, entitled “Fluids Mixing Enclosure”, to the International Space Station (ISS) as a part of the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program (SSEP). This experiment will be sent to the ISS this fall aboard the first operational flight of the SpaceX Dragon.

SSEP is a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education after-school program focused on garnering interest in a variety of fields ranging from technology to engineering for future generations. With the help from eighth grade physical science teachers Carol Wrabel and Marianna O’Brien and visiting local scientists, students were supplied with the tools and research materials to design an experiment to test the effect of microgravity on a physical, biological, or chemical system. On May 12th, a panel of local educators, scientists, and engineers reviewed all Lincoln proposals and chose three of the best ones. The three proposed experiments explore the effect of microgravity on clumping, nano fibers, and silly putty formation.

Students working with the SSEP have gained much interest in science and have learned how much fun science can be! One eighth grade student Victor Cheng raved, “I truly enjoyed the scientific process of learning. Through the SSEP program, I not only learned a lot of valuable information that I would have not otherwise, but I began to enjoy science a lot more.”

The SpaceX Dragon is scheduled to launch in Fall 2012.

To read what the Santa Monica Mirror wrote about this project, click here.

To read about SSEP Mission 2, click here.

To read about SSEP Mission 1, click here

To read an update on this project, please refer to https://casgc.ucsd.edu/?p=3501.