The project, called, A 2001 Mars Odyssey: The Student NanoExperiment Challenge, will incorporate a student-designed experiment (one or more may be selected) into a rack of dozens of small patches of materials (pictured above) to be tested for interactions with Mars' dust, soil and atmosphere. The experiment must be designed to help determine how humans will one day be able to live on Mars.

The experiment will be competitively selected in the Challenge, a cooperative effort of the Planetary Society and NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This will be a real challenge for the students: the experiment can only be 1.0 cm in diameter by 1.0 cm high, and only 3 grams! The experiment must be designed so that the result is visible to the Lander's robotic arm camera. Some examples of hardware student might fit in this tiny space are magnets, solar cells or LED lights.

Students participating in the Challenge will gain valuable real-world experience in science, engineering and project development.

The Mars Environmental Compatibility Assessment (MECA) science team, which has several experiments on the Lander, proposed the idea of including a student experiment on the mission to the Planetary Society. They generously offered space on the patch plate, which is part of their experiment. The MECA team is led by Dr. Thomas Meloy of West Virginia University.

A primary goal of the Planetary Society is to promote and enable public involvement in space exploration. With this goal in mind, we were delighted to be presented with this opportunity for students to participate actively on the NASA/JPL mission.

The schedule for the Challenge is tight. Students must bring turn their ideas into hardware by the end of July. A judging panel, comprised of educators, Planetary Society staff, and the MECA team, will select the ten best submitted experiments during August and September.

The MECA team will then determine how many of which of these ten will be built and tested for inclusion in the mission. The Planetary Society has promised to deliver to MECA the flight-ready student experiment(s) (more than one may be selected) in only about eight weeks from the date of selection.

This project is being done at no cost to NASA. All costs associated with the Challenge, including developing and testing the flight-ready student experiment, are being assumed by the Planetary Society, as part of its cooperative Red Rover, Red Rover venture with the LEGO company.

This is not the first such project for the Society. Now on its way to Mars on the Mars Polar Lander, the Mars Microphone was funded by the members of the Planetary.

The Challenge is just the beginning. The Planetary Society is working closely with NASA and JPL to provide even more public outreach and involvement opportunities, both on the 2001 Lander, and on other missions, such as the Japanese/U.S. cooperative asteroid rendezvous mission.

Since these outreach efforts are all done at no cost to NASA, we continue to seek out corporate partners to help support cutting-edge opportunities like the Student NanoExperiment Challenge, and incidentally, advance the public-private partnership for space exploration. Interested parties are invited to contact the Society. Jeffrey Oslick, Ph.D.
Science and Technology Coordinator
The Planetary Society
[email protected]
(626) 793-5100