CLEVELAND, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- NASA is inviting U.S. students in grades 6-12 to experience microgravity by designing and building experiments to be conducted in a space agency drop tower.
The space agency said it will hold two competitions … "Dropping in a Microgravity Environment," or DIME, for high school students and "What if No Gravity?", or WING, for students in grades 6-9.
NASA said both competitions are open to teams from any state, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
"To enter the competitions, teams must develop a concept for a microgravity experiment, and prepare and submit a proposal to NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland by Monday, Nov. 2," NASA said. "A panel of engineers and scientists at Glenn will evaluate and select the top-ranked proposals for both DIME and WING by Dec. 10."
The top four DIME teams will be invited to Cleveland in April to conduct their experiments at Glenn's 2.2-Second Drop Tower and review the results with NASA personnel. They also will tour Glenn facilities and participate in other activities. All DIME participants visiting NASA must be U.S. citizens.
Up to 50 WING teams will be invited to ship their experiments to Glenn to be drop-tested by NASA staff. The experiments and the resulting data will be returned to the teams so they can prepare reports about their findings.
Additional competition information is available at http://spaceflightsystems.grc.nasa.gov/DIME.html.
