Inwood students’ science project lifts off

Live from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, 12 students from Yeshiva Ketana in Inwood, watched as their award winning science experiment embarked into space aboard the Atlantic space shuttle on July 8.

Aboard the final shuttle mission was an experiment that 18 fifth, sixth and seventh grade students from the school worked on throughout the school year, including after school and on the weekends. Their project “Deposition and Formation of Zinc Phosphate Crystals in Microgravity,” will be returned to them and then they will compare their project with the one conducted in space.

The project was prepared and transferred to the space center on June 28, where it was loaded into the Nanoracks mini-lab and then into the Atlantis payload. In addition to the students’ hard work, the school community came together, and along with corporate scholarships raised more than $25,000 to pay for the trip.

Under the supervision of program coordinators Rabbi Ari Ginian and Stewart Greenberg, the students left from John F. Kennedy Airport on July 7. They not only saw the take off of the 135th and last shuttle into space, but also got to celebrate their project’s selection in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program. It was one of 11 winning project’s nationwide and the only one from New York state.

Following Shabbat, the students trekked back to the space center for an exclusive museum tour and lunch with American astronaut Bruce Melnick. There has been three decades of space exploration and scientific breakthrough under NASA. And as the Atlantis mission STS-135 launched, there was no doubt that the 12 YKLI students had the biggest smiles there.