Arkansas Achievers

• While most students were preparing to start finals late last week, a team of Arkansas State University students was preparing for a different kind of test … a test of their creativity, scientific curiosity and ingenuity. NASA, as in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was assigning the grade. The team, calling itself the A-State Science Support System, stepped into its WebEx time slot, following students from Columbia University and Notre Dame, to present its experiment proposal to NASA scientists. Then the team waited. At 2:56 p.m. Monday, joy erupted among the team members as they opened their email from NASA. Their Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science (SPOCS) project was selected by NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement as one of five in the country to be carried out in 2022 on the International Space Station. Entering the second phase of the competition as one of 10 finalists, the ASU team’s project was among five selected for funding with a $20,000 NASA grant. ASU’s team is featured in the announcement on NASA’s Tumblr page, along with the other winning teams — from Columbia, Stanford, the University of Idaho, and the University of New Hampshire at Manchester. The ASU team…
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