Elementary Schoolers’ Space Experiment Discovers Something Unknown To NASA
By Mikelle Leow, 07 Mar 2023
Are you smarter than a fourth-grader? For once, NASA might have to hang its head low.
Through an interesting experiment, gifted elementary school students from the St Brother André School’s Program for Gifted Learners (PGL) in Ottawa, Canada, realized that EpiPens are unusable—and even fatal—after being launched into space. This means the handy injectable tools, which can save a life in the event of an allergy attack, can be deadly for an astronaut suffering a reaction.
The stellar takeaway is that the space agency hasn’t known about this until now. The Canadian fourth- to sixth-graders, aged nine to 11, are part of NASA’s Cubes in Space initiative, where children and youths around the world can send objects out on rockets to test their viability in space—and maybe even school grown-up scientists.
Here, the elementary schoolers were exploring the effects of cosmic radiation on epinephrine, the key ingredient in EpiPens. They placed epinephrine samples in two tiny cubes and propelled them to the edge of space, with one packet taking off via a rocket and the other launching via a high-altitude balloon (fair question: what were you doing at the age of 11?).
When the cargo returned to Earth, it was evaluated by researchers from the John L. Holmes Mass Spectrometry Facility at the University of Ottawa, who discovered that only 87% of the samples retained pure epinephrine. Remarkably, the other 13% were contaminated and turned into “extremely poisonous benzoic acid derivatives” as a result of cosmic radiation, the university researchers note.
“The ‘after’ samples showed signs that the epinephrine reacted and decomposed,” explains Paul Mayer, Full Professor of the Faculty of Science’s Department of Chemistry and Bimolecular Sciences.
“It was pretty cool,” says one of the young students, Hannah Thomson, in a statement published by Canada’s Global News. “NASA didn’t know.”
As outlined by NASA (via Live Science), cosmic radiation comes from high-energy particles emitted by stars, with the Sun being Earth’s greatest source of radiation. While our atmosphere protects life on Earth from those rays to a great extent, astronauts don’t have the same safeguards in space. Prolonged exposure to cosmic rays can cause acute radiation sickness and heighten the risk of cancer.
As their next course of action, the students are developing a capsule to protect EpiPens from galactic radiation. By the looks of it, they’ll likely go astronomically far in the fields of STEM.
You also can’t keep their aspirations to the ground, as their teacher says the nine- to 11-year-olds are already anticipating life on the Moon and Mars.
[via Live Science and Global News, cover photo 135339758 © Zhukovsky | Dreamstime.com]