Commitment And School Science Projects

They look like a typical group of T-shirted teens hanging out at the mall - these ninth-graders from School Science Project near the Mohawk River in Herkimer County. Their career dreams range from musician to astronomer, farmer to physicist, and a few, naturally, don't yet know what they want to do with their lives. But Thursday, their hearts and minds focused on the space shuttle and on an experiment they designed that is part of NASA mission.

"It's a tremendous opportunity for us," said Nicholas Lochmatow, 13, the group's leader. Lochmatow, who had already been to Cape Canaveral to see one shuttle lift off, was there Thursday. So was Brett Carrig, another student in the group.

Lochmatow's godfather, the lead scientist for the shuttle's main research project, is the connection that makes the improbable possible - giving Jarvis High, with 530 students in seventh through 12th grades, an active hand in a space shuttle flight.

What makes the opportunity more remarkable is that Gregory Jarvis, who was one of seven astronauts killed in the 1986 Challenger explosion, is the high school's School Science Project namesake and was perhaps its most famous alumnus.

Last spring, science teacher Fred Hartmann presented his 100 eighth-graders with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Anyone who wanted could join a group that would design an experiment that might - if it was good enough - be conducted during a shuttle flight.

It wasn't every eighth-grade class that was getting this chance. And it wasn't because Jarvis attended kindergarten through 12th grade in the Mohawk Central school system, a district about 65 miles east of Syracuse.

It was because Dr. Alex Ignatiev, director of the Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center at the University of Houston, is Lochmatow's godfather, and thought the offer would spark more student interest in science.

Hartmann pitched the benefits of a project that colleges or scholarship committees might note a few years down the road. And he told students about the hitch - that they would have to commit a considerable amount of time to the project, and come up with an idea good enough for space travel.

Eight students signed on. They met weekly, sometimes several times a week - during study halls and after school. They brainstormed - thought of growing sugar crystals, seeing how Jell-O stood up without gravity. Because they'd been studying magnetism, they wondered whether the earth's magnetic field had variations that could be measured from space.

"One person couldn't do it alone," said Carrig. "This way, one might go over something and not see it, and someone else might."