St. Petersburg College students reach for orbit

Three St. Petersburg College students are preparing to send their research beyond the classroom and into orbit.

Sophomores Eilya Yazdani and Vinicio Castillo and early college student Nicholas Tsongranis were selected as SPC’s winning team for Mission 21 of the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, a national initiative that gives students the chance to design experiments for the International Space Station.

Their project will fly on NASA’s SpaceX CRS-34 commercial resupply mission, which will carry science, supplies and equipment to the orbiting laboratory.

The SPC team’s experiment studies the formation and properties of calcium alginate hydrogels in microgravity. The work could help researchers better understand materials used in medical and engineering applications when gravity is removed from the equation.

The project was chosen from 14 other SPC teams and is supported by a $26,000 grant from the SPC Foundation. Dr. Grace Moore, assistant dean of natural sciences, is mentoring the team.

“Seeing these students transition from learning science to practicing it at a competitive level is exactly why we promote hands-on research at SPC,” Moore said in the college’s announcement.

The mission will carry more than science. SPC held a “Merging Art and Science” competition to create mission patches for the project. Mark DeRemer, an SPC digital media student, and Andrei Popescu, a fourth grader at Gulf Trace Elementary, designed the selected patches.

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program is run by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education in the U.S., and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally. The program is designed to give students from upper elementary school through college direct experience with experiment design, flight constraints and real research conducted in low Earth orbit.

For SPC, the selection gives three students a rare place in the space research pipeline. Their work will move from Pinellas County to the ISS as part of a broader national effort to connect STEM education with active spaceflight.