A group of Northport middle school students will be heading to the Kennedy Space Center in Naples, Florida in August after being selected as one of the winning teams in NASA’s 2024 Artemis ROADS II National Challenge.
The Northport Board of Education approved the trip Monday evening at its regular board meeting, where Karen Trolenberg, Northport’s NASA Artemis Club advisor, presented to board members what the journey would entail for the five students confirmed to go to the space center from August 12-16. All expenses for the trip, including airfare, lodging, transportation, and meals, are covered by the program. Over the course of the week, students will have a full itinerary filled with learning from experts in the field at NASA’s primary launch center of American spaceflight, research, and technology.
“I think it’s a tremendous opportunity even starting back with the club in general. There were certainly no expectations of actually earning this trip, but they have lots of opportunities to explore some unique science ideas that NASA presented them,” said Northport Superintendent Neil Wetherbee. “Karen did a really nice job of picking a diverse group of students… but it’s a wide range of ages and interests and I think it’s going to be an opportunity for a group of our students to see something they never had the chance to see before.”
Since February, Trolenberg has worked with a team of six students to complete eight lunar mission objectives based on NASA Artemis Missions that aim to send humans back to the moon. The objectives included starting a mission development log and documenting team planning, making a mission patch representing the team, getting to the moon by creating a rocket, and building habitats on the moon. The fifth mission objective was gardening on the moon, followed by the last three, studying the earth from the moon, building a robot to traverse the moon’s surface, and presenting the final mission closeout.
Teams from schools across the country researched and designed their own NASA mission which involved various hands-on activities specified in the challenge like rover programming and cultivating moon plants. Northport’s team, the “Lunar Leapers,” were one of only two schools in Michigan to participate in the nationwide challenge. A total of 14 teams from across the country and Puerto Rico qualified for the trip after completing all of the program’s mission objectives.
With it being the first time Northport has led a group of middle school students in the NASA science program, Trolenberg said she was thrilled to learn about her team’s name being selected to visit the space center. And while she is excited about everything they will learn and be exposed to, Trolenberg hopes that above all, the kids will have fun in the midst of the academic enrichment experience.
“I want them to have fun and to see kids from other states…. I just expect it to be a mind broadening experience, but it’s my hope that they’re going to do or see something that they think is cool because there’s so many different aspects to this — different areas of science and engineering — and that they see something that they sort of connect with,” she said. “Maybe it encourages them to learn more about it in high school or college. Or maybe just in 10 or 15 years, they’ll remember ‘Oh, I’m interested in that because I went to this one thing and I saw something cool,’ and that sparks something in them. You don’t know when that’s going to happen, but that’s what I’m hoping for them.”
