It was blast off at St. John Neumann Regional School recently, as students successfully completed their E-Mission.

Fourth and fifth-graders at the school's Palmerton campus participated in an educational experience called an "E-Mission" or "E-Lab."The students were broken into six teams, five of them located on different planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus and Pluto.The last team was a communications team, which would receive information from all the other teams and relay it back to Earth Mission Control.Earth Mission Control was run by Commander Hutchinson of West Virginia, who communicated through Skype.Hutchinson introduced herself and set up the scenario: The year is 2080, and we've lost contact with a manned spacecraft traveling between Jupiter and Pluto, and we need to mount a rescue operation to find and save them.The students' task was to track when the spacecraft was in their vicinity, plot the trajectory from their perspective using their space charts, and determine the current projected location.The rescue craft had to be supplied with enough air, water and food to ensure the survival for the full round trip back home.Videos and pictures were transmitted to communicate what was expected.Hutchinson also emphasized how to communicate to her properly by calling her "Commander Hutchinson" or "Earth Mission Control" and using "Over" to end their line of communication.Decoders decrypted encoded messages, which transmitted when and where the missing spacecraft entered and exited their systems or other unidentified objects traveling through their planetary systems.Plotters used this information to calculate on a Cartesian (X, Y) Coordinate System space chart.All this information was then relayed to and from the Communications Team to "Earth Mission Control" where Commander Hutchinson would then check their work and see if corrections were needed.All teams came together for a final conference to put the puzzle together, joining the plotted trajectories to and from their planetary systems, to locate the spacecraft's current location.Hutchinson sent out the rescue craft, and declared the mission a complete success when the craft was rescued.The astronaut survivors viewed their new supplies in zero gravity.