The Israeli Space Exploitation Agency (ESA), the Ministry of Education and the Technion are currently formulating a new initiative to launch together with the first Israeli astronaut, also an experiment to be conducted by students in one of the schools in Israel.
Tamara Traubman
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The Israeli Space Exploitation Agency (ESA), the Ministry of Education and the Technion are currently formulating a new initiative to launch together with the first Israeli astronaut, also an experiment to be conducted by students in one of the schools in Israel. The details of the project have not yet been determined, but SLA director Avi Har-Evan says that "in-principle approval from NASA has already been given."
According to the plan, a steering committee will prepare a list of preferred research topics and the Ministry of Education will select some schools and call on them to submit research proposals. Another possibility is that the planners of the experiment will be students from one of the engineering schools.
A team of experts from the Technion will supervise and accompany the schools during the preparation of the proposals, and the steering committee will choose the school that will submit the most suitable experiment. "Our ambition is that some students from the chosen school will also fly to one of the NASA bases," says Yaffe Vigodsky, director of the Science and Technology Administration at the Ministry of Education.
The list of schools to which they will apply to submit research proposals will be determined in the next two weeks. The experiment itself will be carried out by Col. Ilan Ramon, who is supposed to be the first Israeli in space, and will board the space shuttle Columbia at the beginning of 2001. The experiment will be conducted in an "experiment trailer" of "SpaceHab", an American company that specializes in conducting experiments in space.
The cost of the project to Israel, including the activity surrounding the experiment and sending the students to NASA, is estimated at 60 thousand dollars, which will probably be financed by the Ministry of Education. The Office of the Minister of Education gave approval in principle to the budget, but approval from the Minister himself is also necessary.
{Appeared in Haaretz newspaper, 12/11/1999{
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