student spaceflight
experiments program (ssep)

mission 16

to the international space station (ISS)

As part of a PICK Education research collaboration, Ector County ISD (ECISD) was selected to participate in SSEP Mission 16 to the ISS, and is a part of 24 participating communities in 3 countries; USA, Canada and Ukraine. This will be ECISD's third mission in the SSEP and the Mission Patch Art and Design Competition.

SSEP was designed as a model U.S. national Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education initiative, the program gives students across a participating community the ability to design and propose real microgravity experiments to fly in low Earth orbit (experiments conducted in a “weightless” environment).

The Student Spaceflight Experiments Program [or SSEP] is a program of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) in the U.S. and the Arthur C. Clarke Institute for Space Education internationally. It is enabled through a strategic partnership with NanoRacksLLC, which is working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement as part of the utilization of theInternational Space Station as a National Laboratory.