NASA is offering students the opportunity to compete in two microgravity challenges: “Dropping In a Microgravity Environment,” or DIME, and “What If No Gravity?” or WING.
DIME is a team competition for high school students in the ninth through 12th grades. WING is a competition for student teams from the fifth through eighth grades. Both are project-oriented activities that last throughout the school year for the selected teams.
DIME and WING are open to student teams from all 50 states, Washington, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Each team must have an adult supervisor, such as a teacher, parent or technical consultant. Teams may be from any type of organization or club, such as a science class, a group of friends, a scout troop or youth group.
Proposals are due by Nov. 1. A panel of NASA scientists and engineers will evaluate and select the top-ranked proposals by Dec. 1. The winning teams will design and build the experiments that will be conducted in the 2.2-Second Drop Tower at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
The 79-foot tower gets its name because when an experiment is “dropped” into it, the package experiences weightlessness, or microgravity, for 2.2 seconds. Researchers from around the world use this tower to study the effects of microgravity on physical phenomena, such as combustion and fluid dynamics, and to develop new technology for future space missions.
The top four DIME teams will receive an expense-paid trip to Glenn in March 2012 to conduct their experiments, review the results with NASA personnel and tour the center’s facilities. All DIME participants visiting NASA must be U.S. citizens.
Four additional DIME teams, and up to 30 WING teams, will be selected to build their experiments and ship them to Glenn for NASA testing. These experiments and the resulting data will be returned to the teams, so they can prepare reports about their findings.
Link to the NES Virtual Campus.
If you’re 14 to 18 years old, come up with a science experiment for space and upload a video explaining it to YouTube. If your idea wins, it will be performed on the International Space Station and live streamed on YouTube to the world. And you’ll get some out-of-this-world prizes, too.
The Curiosity rover is scheduled for launch to Mars on Nov. 25, 2011. To prepare for the launch, a telecon has been scheduled so you can hear about the many resources available for you to share the excitement of launch with your students. Topics during the telecon are:
NASA has a class assignment for U.S. students: help the agency give the twin GRAIL mission spacecraft headed to orbit around the moon new names.
In a special outreach titled Space Farm 7, seven of the nation’s top agritourism farms have been selected to celebrate and honor the U.S. space program in collaboration with NASA this fall. Each farm has planted corn mazes that will feature designs celebrating NASA’s achievements and progress in space. An increasingly popular phenomenon of crop circle-type creations, each of the seven corn mazes will open this fall to challenge and delight visitors.
Join NES for a video chat on Oct. 5, 2011 at noon EDT. Paulo Younse, a robotics engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will answer student questions about a career as a robotics engineer, robot technology, what scientists already have learned about the geology of Mars, and what they are hoping to learn from the soon-to-launch Mars rover named Curiosity.