Pictured: Students working in the lab at USF.

What started last school year (2022-2023) as a partnership with Student Spaceflight Experiment Program (SSEP) has turned into the experience of a lifetime this school year (2023-2024): a group of Pine View School students will soon see their experiment travel to outer space! SSEP – which aims to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers – is a national program delivered at the local level, with student teams across a community designing and proposing real microgravity experiments to fly in orbit as its core activity. Over 350 students in the Pine View School community participated in the research proposal. Ultimately, the then 7th grade team (now 8th grade team) of Yatharth Kakkad, Felix Ratner, Rugan Suresh, and Rishik Yellu – under the supervision of Teacher Facilitator Marie Rosander – had their project “Ability of microalga Chlorella vulgaris to remove nitrogen and phosphorous from wastewater in microgravity” selected to travel to the International Space Station (ISS) – learn more about their experiment (#8 within Mission 17) here. The students’ experiment will be shipped to the ISS on The Orbiter payload (named for NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Program) on SpaceX CRS-26. The launch is scheduled for tomorrow (Wednesday, November 1) out of Cape Canaveral at 12:03 p.m. EST. Please join us in congratulating Yatharth Kakkad, Felix Ratner, Rugan Suresh, and Rishik Yellu for all of their hard work!

Pictured: Students working in the lab at USF.