Word: experimentally
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Safman, accepted to the College in December, developed the experiment when she was a 14-year-old junior high school student. The project, which took off with the shuttle after a record seven aborted take-offs, involved injecting air bubbles into metal to make it structurally lighter in space.
The experiment was one of 10 winners in the 1982 national Space Shuttle Individual Project contest, sponsored annually by NASA and a nationwide association of science teachers. Safman was the only freshman among the winners.
"I thought it was a fantastic experiment," said Greg Ledderman, Safman's teacher in the ninth-grade research course for which she developed the project. The course is part of a program for gifted students in Montgomery County, Maryland, public schools.
"I didn't realize the implications. The whole project has grown beyond me," Safman said of her experiment.
The senior last June was flown to the Johnson Space Center in Houston to help the shuttle astronauts operate the hardware on her experiment.