A Grade 9 student from Edmonton is headed to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.
A team of five Avalon Junior High School students were selected by the Edmonton Public Schools board as a semi-finalist of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program (SSEP). But among them only Samantha Luchkow will present her findings on July 1, to more than 100 participants from the United States and Canada.
This achievement marks the first time in the six-year run of this program at the junior high school, a team has reached the semi-final round.
A very excited Luchkow spoke to CBC’s Edmonton AM on Thursday about her project.
“I wouldn’t say I’m really nervous about speaking in public and all that, but it will be a bit nerve-racking to be around so many successful people in this domain,” she said.
Edmonton AM5:02Edmonton student presenting her science project at NASA this summer
Samantha Luchkow is a Grade 9 student at Avalon Junior High in Edmonton. She will be presenting her team’s science project to more than 100 participants from all over Canada and the U.S. at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida this summer. Samantha joins us with her teacher, Homa Geisel.
The SSEP is a STEM education initiative for students in Grade 5 to university where they design experiments to be operated in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station.
Luchkow’s project investigates how zero gravity impacts the growth of Bacillus cereus, a food-borne pathogen that causes food poisoning, on rice.
“It’s a really important food source. So it would probably be something we would grow for long term on space missions,” she said.
She said studying the effects of this bacteria could help provide information on other more dangerous bacteria that can potentially grow in space. This information could help them protect food like rice that could be important to space missions.
The idea to use the bacteria came from one of Luchkow’s teammates. She said they all agreed it was the perfect subject for the project as astronauts would have minimal interactions to keep the experiment going.
“So the bacteria kind of does its own thing and it’s really small too so it fits the experiment parameters really well,” she said.
The experiments have to be designed to work within the space station’s mini laboratory.
Dr. Matthew Strickland, an oncologist with Boston’s Mass General Brigham Hospital, believes that studying the growth and development of cancer cells in space may teach us more about how the cells behave here on earth. The former Edmontonian’s research team is using the International Space Station to test the theory.
Close to 30,000 proposals are submitted by students from Canada and the U.S. Only 100 are selected to present.
Students at Avalon were introduced to the program through their teacher Homa Geisel who said it’s important to provide opportunities for students outside classrooms.
“I want to give them this opportunity that there are things that they are learning in class that they can apply in the real world basically,” she said. “This is one of the opportunities for them and that’s why I want to keep doing this for future as well.”