Ithaca College

A team of Ithaca College students has submitted a research project proposal to the NASA Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science Program.

NASA will send five student-designed experiments to the International Space Station in early 2022 through the Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science competition. Five winning teams will each receive a $20,000 grant to construct their payload, conduct public outreach, and run their experiment. 

On October 20th, a team of students from Ithaca College submitted a payload proposal titled, “Investigating Hearing Loss Aboard the ISS.” The project is called ECHO. Past studies have shown that astronauts who have spent significant time aboard the ISS have been affected by some level of hearing loss, with various hypotheses being proposed as the cause for this phenomenon. However, there are no published studies investigating these hypotheses. The Ithaca College ECHO team designed their experiment to test leading hypotheses. Their proposal includes a thorough outreach and marketing element that will involve K-12 students as citizen scientists and conduct both local and online public outreach.

The ECHO team are: Antara Sen (‘23), Jake Brown (‘22), Matthew Weil (‘24), Eli Robinson (‘22), Josh Schmidt (‘22) and Thy Doan Mai Le (‘19) from the Department of Physics and Astronomy; Abby Murtha (‘21) from the Department of Health Promotion and Physical Education; Josh Graning (‘22) from the Department of Biology; Cat Fox (‘22) and Jay Healy (‘22) from the Department of Strategic Communication; and Calvin Carmichael (‘23) from the Division of Business Administration and Finance. The faculty advisor is Dr. Luke Keller from the Department of Physics and Astronomy. The ECHO team also consulted with Dr. Andrew Smith and Dr. Jean Hardwick from the Department of Biology. 

The first round of the selection process is on November 12, 2020. Congratulations and good luck to the ECHO Team!