Abby Golash had always been interested in science, so when the chance came her freshman year in high school to work on a NASA project, she jumped on it.

Golash has been involved in the ‘Ants In Space’ program at NASA for the last four years. The experiment, designed to test the effects of micro-gravity upon the behavior of harvester ants, is currently under way on board the Space Shuttle Columbia.

The ‘Ants in Space’ program was led by space research supply maker SPACEHAB’s Space Technology and Research Students and Syracuse University’s L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science. The groups worked in association with nearby Fowler High School. In January 2000, STARS and Congressman Jim Walsh (R-Syracuse), the chairman of NASA’s appropriations subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives, approached Eric Spina, associate dean of ECS, to partner with a Central New York high school for the project.

Fowler was selected because of its interest in developing a magnet school for science and pre-engineering, Spina said. Fowler’s involvement is characteristic of ECS’s rededication to not only serve the local industrial base but to make sure ECS has invested time, energy and money into grades K-12, he added.

When it began, the project involved nearly 30 students from Fowler, but lost participants because of delays. Some students became discouraged and quit the project while others went on to graduate before its completion, said Brad Miller, a student who is closely involved in the project.

STARS also contracted BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado in Boulder to help the students design and build the device to strict NASA specifications. The students worked with ECS and STARS to develop the experiment and their hypothesis, but BioServe was responsible for the more technical elements, Spina said.

‘It was a constant exchange of information between (the Fowler group) and Bioserve.’ Miller said. ‘We would send ideas back and forth until the habitat we ended up with was nothing like the one we started out designing.’

In April of 2001 the students traveled to Colorado for a simulation of the experiment that was supposed to begin in June. Despite the success of the simulations, launch was delayed when cracks were discovered in the fuel lines of shuttles Atlantis and Discovery. At that point the fleet was grounded until detailed inspections could take place, Golash said.

When launches resumed, trips were focused on service to the International Space Station, but during the delays there was little Golash and Miller could do.

‘Up to that point we had everything set so we couldn’t change much. For the most part we were just waiting for the actual launch,’ said Miller.

And wait they did, until its launch last week. The mission ended up being delayed 19 times. The delays frustrated some of the students, who began to doubt the launch would occur before they entered college, Golash said.

Finally on Thursday, the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off with the Fowler group’s experiments along with other STARS projects from Australia, China, Japan, Israel and Liechtenstein. The launch also made headlines for carrying the first Israeli astronaut.

‘It was great, it was something you never forget. I was blown away. For three and a half years this has been my life and in two or three minutes it was gone,’ Miller said.

After the launch students had the opportunity to meet Walsh and Sean O’Keeffe, NASA administrator and a former professor in SU’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

Live data from the experiments is currently online at www.spacehab.com/stars. The data the group is receiving isn’t at all what they were expecting. Their original hypothesis predicted ‘the ants would tunnel slower in space because of the disorientation, but the data we’re seeing (shows) that the ants in space are tunneling much faster than those on earth,’ Miller said.

Charlotte Archabald, one of the faculty leaders behind the project, sees the project as an interactive learning experience for the students involved.

‘It was an extremely positive experience,’ she said. ‘Two of the three seniors involved are now going into science, and even for the students who aren’t, it’s still an enriching experience that shows them what science really is like instead of just learning it out of a textbook.’

Published on September 8, 2004 at 12:00 pm