11yr old Prerana Pai’s experiments chosen for space launch under NASA’s CIS programme

11yr old Prerana Pai’s experiments chosen for space launch under NASA’s CIS programme

Mangalore Today News Network

Sharjah, June 24, 2014: : An 11 year old girl with her roots in Mangalore and Manipal is in the news  of late for her wonderful achievement. She is  Prerana Pai, a seventh grade student at Delhi Private School, Sharjah.

Two of Prerana’s  experiments have been approved  for space launch under NASA’s  Cubes In Space Programme (CIS) meant for budding young scientists. She  is  the only student from UAE  who has earned this rare honour.

Under the programme students in the age group of 11-14 from across the globe are invited to devise experimental payloads for space and the selected 100 experiments will be  fired into space  in a sounding rocket to be launched by CIS on June 26.The  sounding rockets carries instruments into space to take measurements along a  non-orbiting and parabolic path (trajectory).As many as 75 US  students and 25 students from the rest of the world were selected under the programme.

Prerana’s  first experiment is about studying the manner in which different adhesives are likely to behave in space in the absence of atmospheric pressure. For this, Prerana used a thermocol cube of 12 pieces in which each corner was stuck using a different kind of adhesive such as modelling clay, wax, cello tape, metal wire, thread, school glue and super glue.

The second experiment involves two tiny bottles — one made of plastic and the other of glass — sealed with a modelling clay cork and placed in a cube. The experiment will focus on how the bottles react to lack of atmospheric pressure:

Prerana’s mother Ragini hails from Carstreet in Mangalore while her father  Harish Pai is from Manipal. The couple  has been staying in Sharjah. Though Prerana Pai  was born in Mangalore,  her schooling is in Sharjah.