NASA has selected students from six high schools around the country to prepare and fly their experiments on future NASA space flights.

"By participating in the NASA Student Involvement Program, these students will get hands-on experience in science and engineering fields," said Lynn Marra, NASA Student Involvement Program (NSIP) Manager. "This flight program will give the students an exciting experience participating in the nation's exploration efforts," she added.

During the next four months students and their teachers will work with engineers and technicians from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va., to prepare their experiments for flight. The student experiments will be flown on a NASA suborbital sounding rocket in June or on a future Space Shuttle flight, following the program's Return to Flight.

Eight teams from the six schools were competitively selected to participate in the national program. Four of the NSIP teams will participate in the sounding rocket program and four will participate in the Space Shuttle program. Each team will spend one week in June at Wallops.

The students with sounding rocket experiments will spend their week participating in the final preparations of the experiments and launch reviews, receive instruction in rocketry, view the launch of the rocket, and begin analysis of their data.

The student teams with Space Shuttle experiments will participate in the final preparations and testing of the experiments, tour the Wallops operations, and give technical presentations on their experiments. These experiments will be placed in a Space Experiment Module for flight in the Space Shuttle cargo bay.

The winning entrees in the NSIP flight opportunities competition are:

Sounding rocket experiments:

• Glenbrook North High School, Northbrook, Ill.
• Columbus High School, Columbus, Ga.
• Sauk Rapids-Rice High School, Sauk Rapids, Minn.
• Delta Cyber School, Delta Junction, Alaska

Space Shuttle experiments:

• Glenbrook North High School, Northbrook, Ill.
• Agoura High School, Agoura Hills, Calif.
• Columbus High School, Columbus, Ga.
• Cambridge Ridge and Latin High School, Cambridge, Mass.