Dorsey High’s Silkworm Project Was on Shuttle
An experiment testing the effects of space travel on silkworms, partly created by students at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles, was among the 80-some research projects on board the space shuttle Columbia.
Schoolchildren from six countries, including Australia and Liechtenstein, had sent science experiments into space with the shuttle, which launched Jan. 16.
The U.S. students were working in partnership with their counterparts in China, said Rep. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), a Dorsey alumna. Their experiment took a familiar high school biology project -- witnessing the maturation of a silkworm larva into a moth -- and gave it a novel spin.
Just as countless students have lined shoe-box containers with mulberry leaves and watched silkworm larvae eat, grow, spin cocoons and emerge as adult moths, the students created a special habitat to study how the larvae would develop in a low-gravity environment.
After the Chinese students were unable to procure the proper visas to attend the launch of the Columbia last month, Watson said, the Dorsey students took over the experiment.
Atiabet Ijan Amabel, Cristina Mojarro and Juan Carlos Ortega attended Columbia’s launch and put the silkworm habitat in the shuttle.
Using Web posting, the Dorsey students were monitoring their experiment daily, said Joe Oliver of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s instructional technology branch, who had been advising the students. “We were getting data up until yesterday,” he said. Information included temperature, relative humidity and other measures of the larvae’s progress.
Mojarro, 17, said the data had indicated that the students’ hypothesis -- that the low-gravity situation would cause the larvae to develop slower than normal -- was incorrect. But more data were necessary, she said. NASA locked down the information stream after the shuttle’s explosion. Mojarro said that when she found out about the tragedy Saturday morning, “it was hard to understand” the magnitude of what had happened.
She contacted other students with projects aboard the shuttle, who shared in her disbelief. “We were e-mailing back and forth, letting this go through us and trying to understand,” she said. “All we could do was pray for the families of the astronauts.”
Watson said she hoped that the students would not give up in the wake of the tragedy. Setbacks, she said, are often part of scientific exploration.
For the Dorsey students, she hoped, the real legacy of Columbia would be the relationships that the Dorsey students had forged with other young scientists from around the globe.
“It opened up the world to our students, who are in an inner-city school,” she said.
“They have made contact that will go on for the rest of their lives.”
