Parkside students reveal their planets with real-world NASA astronaut

MANCHESTER, N.H. – One day human beings may travel to distant planets, but in the meantime, there are always the distant planets being created at Parkside Middle School.

On Monday, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), NASA Astronaut Christina Koch and other dignitaries travelled to Parkside to meet with fifth graders and see planets they created as part of an astronomy project earlier this year.

One of those students was Ginevra Gjeroveni, who created a planet named Glia with pink trees and crystalline life forms. She presented her planet with classmate Believe Mupanga, as their planets and others took statistics from real-life planets to simulate conditions on their created planets along with other facts about proposed undiscovered planets that they could think of, such as a planet where “the food tastes better” and a planet where all its inhabitants are at peace forever.

For Gjeroveni, it took about a week to think about everything she wanted to include in her planet, but she still thinks about what’s life is like on actual other planets.

“I don’t know if I want to be an astronaut, but I’d like to go to space one day to see what it’s like to be floating without gravity,” she said.

Koch, who has been an astronaut since 2013 and was the only woman on NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, says she was definitely dreaming of becoming an astronaut when she was the age of these students. Indeed, she believes that the ideas of the students on display is at the core of NASA’s goal to explore the universe and increase human knowledge.

“It’s so exciting to see the imagination and creativity of the fifth graders and their excitement for exploration,” said Koch.

Manchester Board of School Committee Vice Chair Jim O’Connell stated that this project was another example of the amazing things happening in Manchester’s 21 public schools every day.

“You see the pride in their work and the work that they’ve done, it’s all just very uplifting,” he said. “This isn’t just a moment in time, but weeks of work where the students learned about environmental science and physics and other subjects that will end up having a massive effect on their futures.”

Shaheen was also impressed with the students’ work, noting that it was an appropriate continuation of their participation in the New Hampshire National Guard’s Starbase program. The Senator also noted that America’s investment in continued space exploration is critical.

“We know that the next arena for competition is space. And as we look at our adversaries, China in particular, we need to continue to compete with them,” she said.

Shaheen also noted that America’s strength in this and other areas of geopolitics is its ability to create alliances, noting a recent trip she took to meet with members of the Japanese space program working with American astronauts.

“Seeing that collaboration and how it can benefit all the countries of the world is critical,” she said.

After the students presented their projects, Koch and Shaheen stayed for a grade-wide assembly, leaving later in the day for a separate roundtable discussion at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.