WEARE, New Hampshire USA — Young scientists from Weare Middle School — who established their scientific bona fides earlier this year by placing in the top 25 in the Team America Rocket Challenge — are aiming to reach new heights come late April.

That's when the Weare Middle School Rocketry Team will journey to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., to launch a seven-foot-long, 22-pound rocket a mile into the sky.

After the rocket reaches that height it will pop open and its cargo, a small robot, will descend to earth by parachute, landing in a field at an Alabama sod farm, said Tyler Becker, a freshman at John Stark Regional High School and the student project leader for the launch.

He said the robot, which will collect flight data on its rapid upward trip and its slow descent, will then detach itself from its parachute, collect a 40 gram biological sample (plant, insect or algae) and use an auger to drill into the earth to a depth of several inches, collecting a geological sample of rock or soil.

That's what the team's 83-page proposal, "Model Mission to Mars: Biological, Geological and Atmospheric Robotic Sampling In an Unknown Environment" calls for the team to accomplish in April at NASA's Student Launch Initiative program.

What's particularly amazing about the Weare team is that it emerged as one of the top 25 in the nationwide Team America Rocketry Challenge in Virginia in May, an event that drew 100 entries, with many opponents made up mostly of high school students.

"It's quite an accomplishment," said Steven Slater, an electrical engineer with BAE Systems, one of six industry mentors, whose son, Ben, is the team's payload designer and robotics engineer.

Ben was the only upperclassman on the team when it won in May. He is now a senior at Hollis-Brookline and recently took part in a practice launch of a scale model.

Mark Kibler, a science teacher at Weare Middle School and educational mentor for the project, said Slater's dedication shows the kind of enthusiasm the project has created for all involved.

"It's probably the first ever to have team members from five different schools in three different states take part," he says.

After the team's success in May it was invited, along with 24 other teams, to submit proposals to NASA for a launch. The students, many of whom were headed to different schools in different states, spent a lot of their time over the summer developing the 83-page proposal, which was accepted and will bring a small amount of funding, on the order of $2,000, from NASA for the launch.

"We're actually contractors with NASA," said Kibler, whose son, Chris, now a freshman at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Mass., is the launch and flight safety leader for the team.

Kibler said team members have been able to stay in touch through teleconferences, paralleling an actual NASA mission where scientists and engineers collaborate with colleagues thousands of miles away.

And the same kind of conferencing will be used for team members to collaborate with seventh- and eighth-grade students at Weare Middle School, where three new Team America Rocket Challenge teams are being formed.

Kibler, who has taught science for nearly 30 years, said excellence in science and engineering competitions is nothing new for Weare students. He has been adviser for several FIRST/Lego robotics teams that won awards from 2000-2002 and this year. The 2002 robotics team represented the United States in Demark in a student exchange program and was invited to the White House when President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind educational reform act in 2002.

Kibler said he is pleased the school district administration and Weare Middle School Principal David Pabst have been supportive of the rocketry program, placing it on a par with competitive team sports in terms of school funding.

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