BI teacher one of 8 in country to be launched into suborbit

Hyla Middle School science teacher Caroline Little will be one of eight teachers from across the United States to launch up into the stratosphere May 7 from a top-secret location with a series of experiments designed by sixth- and seventh-graders.

Little will experience microgravity through a series of 30 parabolas, a process in which an aircraft pushes just outside of the Earth’s atmosphere in short, controlled bursts, not unlike the motion of a dolphin breaching through the ocean or a rollercoaster’s smaller hills.

She’ll be testing whether Mars’ regolith, the mixture of dust and rock that covers the surface of the planet, is a suitable medium for water filtration in space — data that could inform water use on future space missions.

“Water is so important to everything, especially living on an island — all life processes need it. You can’t ship astronauts with all their water, because it’s too heavy, so NASA has to find a way to capture clean water in space,” Little explained. “[Our class] has some idea of how we filter water, but how do we do it without gravity? That’s what we’re trying to answer.”

The experiments were designed by 44 Hyla students on Bainbridge Island with input from Little and professional astronomical researchers, engineers and program staff with the nonprofit Space for Teachers.

Little will run six tests assembled by her students, each a modified medical plunger and attached receptacle loaded with a filtration medium, a little water and a scoop of microscopic glass beads. Three plungers will contain arcillite, a type of fine-grained clay developed for growing plants in space, and three will contain the mock-Mars regolith, a substrate designed to simulate the composition of dust on the red planet’s surface.

Out of half the sixth-grade class, five hypothesized that the regolith would work best, and four leaned toward the arcillite.

“The regolith has a bigger surface area, because it has bigger chunks. The arcillite might fall through the filter,” student Alexander St Cyr said.

Before designing the tests, the class had to understand how water behaves in a container in microgravity environments, which proved to be a challenge. They could observe a container with water sloshing around inside, but how could they observe and control the movement of the water itself?

Their closest approximation: a classic drop test.

“We Velcro’d the items to the back of a large plastic tub, attached an iPad to the opposite side (also Velcro’d in), turned the iPad on, sealed the tub and dropped it from the top of the cargo net at school into another net that the students were holding,” Little said. “The idea was to see how water, soapy water, dirty water, and colored water would react during free fall.”

In total, Little will be in microgravity for about 11 minutes, but it won’t be all at once. The arc of each parabola means the crew only experiences weightlessness for about 22 seconds at a time, as the craft moves up and down out of reach of Earth’s gravity field. If all goes well, she’ll run one test per parabola, with ample arcs to spare — but she’s had to prepare to enjoy the ride, too. Since September, Little has been training physically, meeting with researchers weekly and meticulously reviewing her materials list, which she must report to the research team.

“When I started training, I was thinking, ‘Oh, this is real!’” she said.

Little may be the first local science teacher to leave the Earth, but she’s not the first to try. Michael R. Jones, a science teacher at Kellogg Middle School in Shoreline, was one of NASA’s “Teachers in Space” finalists who competed to become the first private citizen in space aboard the ill-fated Challenger rocket in 1985.

Little hopes the impact of the experiment lands with her students because while she’s been interested in space research for her entire life, she never had an opportunity like this during her own education.

“I really want to see student empowerment. These kids feel ownership, pride. They feel like they’re doing what matters — and it does,” Little said. “I want them to feel like, ‘I can do something that makes a difference.’”

Students Alexander St. Cyr and Sonali Siddaiah work to assemble the filtration system.

Students measure a tiny amount of microscopic glass beads in preparation for the filtration experiment.

Students measure arcillite to use in a filtration experiment.

A cup of substrate that simulates regolith from the planet Mars, the loose dust and rocks that sit atop the bedrock. Soil is part of Earth’s regolith, but Mars has no humus or bacteria.