MARSBalloon National Pilot

The general project aims are:
- Promote careers in space science and engineering to KS3 & KS4 students aged 11-16 with a particular focus on 15 year olds who are making choices about A levels;
- To teach students about ongoing activities in the exploration of Mars and about the Mars surface environment;
- To launch up to 200 unique student made Mars experiments to an altitude with conditions analogous to that at the Martian surface (30km altitude) and get them to analyse the results;
- To publicly promote the launch and project aftermath to further spread the message, and to lay the foundations for a recurring national program.

The expected overall impact includes:
- Communicating the benefits of space science and engineering careers directly to students via the distributed material to encourage uptake of maths and science A-levels;
- Engaging students with the concept of Mars science and exploration by tasking them to design experiments that will test the response of materials to a Mars like environment, or investigate the conditions found there;
- Engaging students with the daily activities of space scientists and engineers to get them to consider a similar career;
- Engaging with teachers on Mars planetary science and the potential careers paths for their students who are interested in science and engineering;
- Engaging with the public on current UK Mars exploration activities.

All project resources, including the school information pack, flight notifications and summaries of previous flights will be hosted on the to be constructed www.marsballoon.com (domain owned by SEA). The website and promotion of external links to this site will be the primary mechanism of distributing these resources. This website will comply with full accessibility guidelines and the cost of updating it after each flight is included in the cost of each flight campaign.

The project details and website link will be distributed via at least these methods:
- The STEMNET networking system which can be used by teachers to discover new projects;
- Via regional STEM coordinators who have extensive numbers of teacher contacts in their local areas. SEA regularly work with Graphic Science Ltd, the coordinators for Bristol, Bath, Somerset and Gloucestershire, to promote projects and will ask for the project details to be passed on to other regional coordinators;
- The MARSBalloon twitter account (already existing) and a new facebook page (requested in student feedback of previous projects);
- Through existing contacts in the south west from previous SEA outreach projects (including a number of schools who expressed an interest after hearing about the MARSBalloon local pilot);
- Through existing media contacts made during previous outreach projects (including the register, ITV news west and BBC Bristol, Somerset, Oxfordshire and Nottinghamshire).

These same contacts and those available to the schools involved will be used to publicise the results of each launch campaign, helping to boost the uptake for the next campaign.