The Trenton Central High School CLOµDS program combines the microgravity-based teacher professional development run by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and NASA with the efforts of Science Mentors 1:1 to create a unique research experience for students. Together with PPPL mentors, 12 gifted and talented student scientists are working to design, build, and test an experiment that will be performed aboard a microgravity flight at NASA.

Their project will fly alongside teachers’ experiments in microgravity, where their mentors will collect data for them to analyze after the flight. The students will need to build their experiment to meet the high safety and scientific standards of NASA engineers while also creating ground-based experiments that they will enter into the Mercer County Science and Engineering Fair.

Students began this fall by creating project proposals and presenting them to their peers for review. After much discussion and research, a project was chosen and preliminary ground-based testing has begun. In the upcoming weeks, students will finalize a design for the experiment and begin to build. The results of their science fair projects will assist in the design and building processes. By the start of next year, students will have experienced the scientific method first hand!