Help Mame Faty Lo bring Senegal to space!

How rad would it be for a young girl to work on her first space mission and learn at the edge of discovery?

 

Senegalese Youth for Space (S.Y.S.), a non-for-profit organization, provides young senegalese girls an opportunity to take part in the next wave of spatial innovations relevant to the African continent and the cosmos in general. We are piloting our first collaboration where girls with the help of their Biology and Physics teachers will become climate change solutionaries through an inquiry-based investigation that starts in the classroom, gets launched on SpaceX CRS-26 and stays in orbit for 45 days on the International Space Station (ISS).

35 students in 7th grade from my former all-girl boarding school, Maison d'Education Mariama Ba (MEMBA), will design a classroom experiment to capture the most carbon by growing alfalfa, a versatile forage and legume crop known for high edible biomass production, ability to sequester carbon and rejuvenate soils, and potential for biomass. They will then plan for a larger impact in a school garden of alfalfa, considering and comparing growing methods best for Earth and in space. These ground trials will be conducted mid- to late February and March 2022. The goal is to grow the biggest plant in 28 days and send recommendations to Magnitude.io, a tech company that provides an educational platform that allows students around the world to engage in real ISS National Lab plant biology experiments called Exolab.

 

 

 

 

The girls will also learn about flight missions, space life support systems, food crop production and the importance of the carbon cycle on Earth and in space. Their ideas and data will be used and connected to the flight experiment being developed separately but concurrently with Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and other researchers. Exolab-10 will be in orbit in late October 2022 and returns in early December 2022. The girls will be given access to the Flight Mission, Post-Flight Analysis session, data and reports that would help identify based-level data relevant to -omics research, the efficacy of carbon sequestration of alfalfa in biofuel production, bioregenerative life support systems, and edible biomass.

 

 

 

 

 

Please help me make this opportunity a reality, the first of many and the first time Senegal will participate in research aboard the ISS!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disclaimer: Due to being located in Senegal, I, Mame Faty Lo, founder of S.Y.S., cannot create a GoFundMe under my name. Hence my very good and trusted friend Dofan Aziz Kone has opened it from the U.S. and will redirect the funds upon completion.