When NASA’s space shuttle Atlantis lifts off for the International Space Station, a University of Colorado at Bolder butterfly experiment will be aboard, monitored from Earth by thousands of K-12 students.

As part of The “CSI 03 — Butterflies in Space” project, a butterfly payload designed and built in CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering department will carry two butterfly habitats containing monarch and painted lady butterfly larvae, as well as nectar and other food. Secondary school students will help CU-Boulder compare the development of butterfly larvae in the weightless environment of the ISS with that of butterfly larvae raised on Earth.

Some 100 U.S. schools have received official butterfly larvae classroom kits to allow students to compare differences in growth rates, feeding, pupation, and the emergence of butterflies between environments on Earth and in space. Hundreds of additional schools will participate informally, building their own classroom butterfly habitats.

Once the larvae are transferred onto the ISS, images will be taken of them every 15 minutes, then daily downlinked and uploaded to Internet sites. The online butterfly images will be available for viewing at bioedonline.org, a science support and teacher training site of the Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Education Outreach, which developed a teachers’ curriculum guide and Web site support. The images also will be available at the Monarch Watch Web site, a University of Kansas educational and research group, which supplied the monarch butterflies.

The CSI 03 project is the 4th CU-Boulder K-12 educational experiment to join the ISS, sponsored in part by Houston’s National Space Biomedical Research Institute and conducted in collaboration with several nonprofit educational organizations. The Butterfly Pavilion is providing science support and teacher training. More information is available at Orion’s Quest, which provides spaceflight educational opportunities to K-12 schools.

UPDATE: The butterflies have reached adulthood on the International Space Station!

“Painted Lady” by SD Dirk (Flickr Commons)

Filed under: Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Grades K-5, K-12 Outreach Programs