NASA Announces Student Competitions: DIME and Waste Limitation Management and Recycling Design Challenge

NASA Education Invites Students to Drop Everything!

NASA’s Dropping In a Microgravity Environment, or DIME, allows students in high school and in middle school to design and build an experiment that will be operated in a NASA research drop tower. This will put the students’ experiment in microgravity, just as if it were in space.

New for school year 2009-10 will be a two-part DIME with separate competitions for high school teams and teams of students in grades 6-9.

Four teams in the high school DIME competition will be invited to visit NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and operate their experiment in the drop tower. Four additional teams will send their experiment to Glenn for the drop tower staff to operate it. Teams comprised of students in grades 6-9 will compete for the opportunity to build an experiment to be operated in the same drop tower by NASA drop tower staff.

Proposals are due on Nov. 2, 2009. Competition selections will be announced in mid-December and drop tower operations will be conducted in April 2010.

The DIME competition is funded by NASA’s Teaching From Space program.

For more information about this opportunity, visit http://spaceflightsystems.grc.nasa.gov/DIME.html .

If you have questions about this opportunity, please e-mail your inquiries to the DIME team at dime@lists.nasa.gov.

NASA Announces the Waste Limitation Management and Recycling Design Challenge

Join the Waste Limitation Management and Recycling Design Challenge and create a Sustainable Water Recycling System for the moon.

The WLMR-DC is for students in grades 5-8. The challenge uses real-world scenarios that meet science and mathematics content standards. Students can participate in a formal, informal or home-school setting.

Teams of up to six students will design a water recycling system for the unique environment of the moon. Teams will then test their system on a simulated wastewater stream and report results to NASA in February 2010. The winning team will earn a trip to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Entries are due Feb. 1, 2010.

For more information and contest rules, please visit http://wlmr.nasa.gov/.

Questions about the challenge should be directed to Jay Garland at Jay.L.Garland@nasa.gov.