HANCOCK COUNTY, Miss. – Is there usable water on Mars? How does the space
environment
affect earthworms? What is the effect of El Nino on whale shark migration?
What does a rocket flight
sound like?

Students nationwide tackled these and many other questions as part of the
NASA Student
Involvement Program, or NSIP, competition. NSIP is a national education
program for grades K
through 12 that links students directly with NASA’s diverse missions of
research, exploration and
discovery.

Through this program, student experiments were selected in January 2002 to
fly on either a
NASA suborbital sounding rocket in June or a future Space Shuttle mission.

NASA’s Stennis Space Center in south Mississippi will host the NSIP National
Symposium
for high school winners and their teachers May 5-8, 2002. The students will
present their winning
projects from one of the following competition areas: Design a Mission to
Mars; Watching Earth
Change; and Science and Technology Journalism. Students and NASA scientists
and engineers will
discuss issues raised by each winning team.

During June, space flight student winners and their teachers will spend a
week at the NASA
Goddard Space Flight Center’s Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va.
During their visit the
students will work with Wallops personnel to make final experiment
preparations and get a first-hand
look at the facility operations.

In addition, those participating in the rocket project at Wallops will
witness the launch of their
experiments, analyze the data and present their findings to other students
and NASA engineers and
scientists.

Every student who enters the NSIP competition with a qualified entry will
receive a
certification of participation. First place winners from each judging center
in grades K-8 will win
presentations at their schools by a NASA representative.

The following Web site provides additional information about the NSIP
competition:

http://education.nasa.gov/nsip

The Offices of Human Resources and Education, Space Flight, Earth Science
and Space
Science at NASA Headquarters, Washington, support the NSIP Competition.