By Carrie James
On Nov. 28, cluster-one students gathered in Woodland Middle School's little theater for a pre-launch briefing about the space shuttle Endeavor STS 108 to find out how their project, "Magnets and the Magnetosphere," will travel with the shuttle into space.
"We wanted to give the kids the concepts behind a lift-off and what it entails," said Richard Santer, sixth-grade science teacher for cluster one who wrote the proposal for the project that the students are sending on Endeavor. "We'll talk about what an actual flight launch is and how to watch it."
The students' project will study how magnets are affected by the magnetosphere surrounding the Earth. They started research at the end of August to prepare for the Nov. 29 launch, which was postponed to Dec. 4 after technical difficulties at the International Space Center.
"When I heard that we were doing something that involved something getting sent into space, I was so excited," said sixth-grader Marissa Noblett.
The test magnets will travel in a small canister kept in the payload bay of Endeavor STS 108, and will pass through the magnetosphere twice during the mission.
"We are the smallest part of a huge science mission," Santer said. "The largest part is to deliver Expedition team 4 to the international space center and bring back Expedition team 3. It's a 10-day trip."
This is the second year that cluster-one teachers Santer, Isabelle Glick, Anne Wall and Eleanor Allen are taking part in Student Experiment Module with their students. The pre-launch briefing gave the students a better understanding of what it takes to send a shuttle into space and what will happen on this mission, STS 108.
First, Santer gave a brief demonstration of the lift-off, explaining that it takes loads of energy to get the shuttle off the ground with enough force to enter space. He pointed out the shuttle's two different fuel sources and explained what their purposes were and what happened when they separated from the shuttle.
Then, a group of students from Allen's reading group presented a skit that let students explain to other children the launch process and what it feels like to those aboard the shuttle.
Launch control communicates with the shuttle's crew intermittently during the hours and minutes before lift-off, checking diagnostics and operations.
Next, Santer explained how a launch, while only taking a few minutes on television, is something that crews, launch and mission control staff and other NASA staff work on throughout the day of the mission. He also showed video of what goes on to prepare for a shuttle launch.
"The last nine minutes of a launch can take over an hour," Santer told the kids. "And our launch is an evening launch, so we will not get light like we did last time."
The students can tune into NASA television on their TV sets or on the Internet, Santer said. Also, some other stations might broadcast the launch.
"You are a very select group of people that can say they touched or will touch something that has been in space, and it's a tradition that we celebrate this," Santer told the group of about 100 cluster-one students.
The children will test the magnets a second time once back from space to see what, if anything, has happened to them during their travel around Earth.
Some students have already started to speculate."I think that the magnets will become stronger, and the metal objects will become magnets," said sixth-grader Michelle Garzia.
The students should get the magnets back in February or March, Santer said, and then the children will develop science projects to study them.
Santer also hopes his students will develop a scrapbook or keepsake of this year's mission so that future cluster-one generations can glimpse what it was like to work on a project that went into space.
"We are going to come up with a way to specially commemorate this mission," Santer said.
