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Rainbow, 16, to join Nasa in hunt for life at the edge of space
Mark Prigg, Science and Technology Editor14 Jun 2010
A LONDON student is to help Nasa search for life at the edge of earth's atmosphere.
Rainbow Lo, a 16-year-old pupil at Ursuline High School, Wimbledon, will spend two weeks in California with the US space agency on a mission to launch a rocket 115 kilometres into the sky.
The Clotho project is being run with a group of amateur space enthusiasts called the Maverick Foundation. It hopes to discover how high up in the earth's atmosphere life can survive.
The team will launch a rocket into the stratosphere. It will release a probe that will collect any microbes it finds before returning to earth. The organisms will be analysed to help understand how they survive in one of the planet's harshest environments.
Miss Lo, who is studying A-levels in biology, chemistry, psychology, and maths as well as AS-level theology, said: "I couldn't believe it when I won, it was a dream come true. I'm eagerly antici-pating working with the team because everyone's so friendly and I can't wait to see if there really is life in the stratosphere. It'll be amazing if there is."
Miss Lo is going on next month's two-week research expedition after winning a competition organised by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts. Participants had to explain how they would look for microbes at the project's launch site. Miss Lo's entry used a jam jar, mesh and an infrared spectrometer.
Her teacher Gwenael Le Doare said: "Rainbow is an enthusiastic, extremely able student who has a natural curiosity, someone who will ask pertinent questions during laboratory time."
Dr Rachel Brazil, project manager of Nesta's Crucible programme, will go with Miss Lo and the other winner, Joe Campion of King Edward VI College in Nuneaton. "Rainbow impressed the judges from the start," she said.
