A high-flying K-12 education effort by the University of Colorado at Boulder will feature two science investigations launching on a NASA space shuttle this week, with both continuing on for an extended stay aboard the International Space Station.

A payload carrying a seed germination experiment and a second experiment involving eyelash-sized worms will be launched Dec. 7 aboard the space shuttle Discovery from Cape Kennedy, Fla., said Louis Stodieck, director of the BioServe Space Technologies Center. Headquartered in CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department, BioServe will downlink video, still images and data from the experiments to its educational partners, who will provide the information and accompanying curriculum materials to teachers working with an estimated 1,000 elementary, middle and high school students in the United States and abroad, he said.

Some classrooms will be tracking the effects of near zero gravity on the germination of radish and alfalfa seeds orbiting Earth on Discovery, comparing the effects to seeds bound by Earth’s gravity sprouting simultaneously in their own schools, said Stodieck. Other students will focus on a group of nematodes known as C. elegans that will be doing a six month-stint on the space station. Students will monitor population dynamics, physiology, daily movements, and even gene activity, including possible genetic mutations caused by space radiation, he said.

“This is an exciting project for BioServe and a great opportunity to engage K-12 students in space research,” Stodieck said of the payload, which has been dubbed “CSI” by the BioServe team. “We want to help meet teacher educational objectives, but also conduct meaningful scientific research on gravity-dependent biological processes that support NASA’s program for the human exploration of space.”

BioServe, a Research Partnership Center that works with NASA will be partnering with two educational groups on these experiments, said Stodieck. The seed experiment involves a program called “Adventures of the Agronauts” at North Carolina State University -- a free, online science curriculum with a space biology theme for elementary students -- while the nematode project involves Orion’s Quest, a Web-based education program based in Detroit that works closely with NASA and various schools on K-12 space education efforts.

Since the seeds in space will be sprouting in a translucent, gel-like material, the students will be able to chart root and stem growth, comparing them to seeds sprouted on Earth that orient themselves toward the soil surface in response to gravity. “A seed germinating in the low gravity of space is a bit like a swimmer underwater in the dark who loses all perception on which way is up,” Stodieck said.

The nematode experiment is sponsored by the Malaysian Space Agency and will involve an automated growth chamber designed and built by BioServe that will maintain a population of C. elegans, a popular organism in labs around the world and whose genome is now fully sequenced by scientists, said Stodieck. High- and low-resolution cameras on the space station will allow scientists from Malaysia, Canada and the US and middle and high school students to track changes in population, morphology and movement of the translucent worms on orbit.

“If these nematodes lose muscle mass like astronauts lose muscle mass during space flight, the students should be able to see it in their daily behavior,” Stodieck said. “We anticipate the students will be able to do quite a lot of research on these organisms, some of which should be publishable in scientific journals.”

The seeds and worms will fly in BioServe’s Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus, or CGBA, a suitcase-sized payload that has been used to carry out dozens of life science and biomedical experiments. Versions of the CGBA have flown on more than a dozen shuttle missions, the Russian Mir space station before its demise in 2001, and one CGBA delivered to the International Space Station in 2001 is still there, he said.

After the nematode payload is returned to Earth, scientists will be able to look closely at the physiology and genetics of the nematodes, which reach sexual maturity in about a week, he said. The orbit duration of the nematode experiment will be more than ten times longer than any previous C. elegans experiment in space.

We anticipate being able to look at accumulated genetic mutations over about 30 generations of these organisms,” he said. Such organisms could conceivably be used as biological “dosimeters,” or devices used to measure exposure to cumulative doses of radiation over time, as NASA prepares for manned missions to the moon and Mars, where space radiation is more severe than in the near-Earth environment, he said.

The Malaysian Space Agency –which will launch an astronaut on board the Russian Soyuz rocket mission 15S in September of 2007, will be working with government officials there to involve hundreds of Malaysian high school students in the projects, said Stodieck.

BioServe hopes to launch such educational experiments with NASA on an annual basis, teaming with industrial partners, he said. For information on BioServe, go to the Web at: http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/BioServe/index.html. For information on Orion’s Quest go to: http://www.orionsquest.org/. For information on Adventures of Agronauts go to: http://www.ncsu.edu/project/agronauts. If you are interested in learning more about the overall program please call Stefanie Countryman at 303-735-5308.