Three SCVi students created a science experiment that has garnered the interest of team members from the International Space Station.

In fact, the members of the ISS project were so impressed that they invited the Santa Clarita trio to send their experiment into orbit and be hosted by the scientists on board the orbiting space station.

“Our experiment aims to test the effects of microgravity on the formation of iron rust,” said Kai Turner, a Santa Clarita Valley International senior and team member. “We will be testing this by exposing an iron sample to water on the ISS and then, upon return to Earth, we will compare our samples to two identical “Ground Truth” experiments.”

The purpose of the experiment is not only to have a deeper understanding of oxidation and corrosion in a microgravity environment, but the team members hope this study will give insight and deeper understanding of space travel in general.

“Researching rust in space is important because as space travel becomes publicly available, more and more materials will be sent to space, (and) we need to know what will happen to these materials,” said team member Alec Lewis. “Currently the ISS is made out of materials that won’t rust, but with our experiment we will be able to see what happens when rust forms in microgravity.”

The team, consisting of Alec Lewis, Dustin Fields and Kai Turner, developed the experiment in their SCVi chemistry class after they were instructed to write a proposal for the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program, or SSEP.

“(The SSEP) program lets schools develop proposals for possible experiments that have to do with microgravity, (and) there is a selection process that dwindles all the projects in a school system down till the flight experiment,” said Lewis. “Part of the proposal was to give meaning to the experiment and why we would benefit from the research, that’s where we came up with the idea of researching rust.”

And although the three high schoolers have done diligent prep and design for the experiment, the SCVi seniors made the implementation of the experiment easy on the astronauts.

“In our proposal we are basically just telling them to open and shake our experiment the first day it gets to the ISS,” said Dustin Fields.

For more information on the experiment, view an informational video on SCVi’s Facebook page here.