NALTA: North America Large-area Time-coincidence Arrays

Okay, that’s a mouthful.  I first read about this a month ago and put it on my list of things to look into.  What I was hoping for was something that might be applicable for participation by middle school students.  NALTA is a cosmic-ray detection experiment which requires fairly simple equipment which is placed on the school roof and is largely (completely?) maintenance free. 

One of the experiments described involved students looking at the correlation between things like barometric pressure and cosmic ray detection rates.  On the surface, that’s not conceptually difficult.  Alas, the experiments themselves are pretty clearly targetted at high school and college undergraduates.

A related/sister project is being run a little closer to home.  MARIACHI is also a cosmic ray detection experiment using somewhat different technology. As cool as all this is, it’s not quite middle school level.  So unless all we wanted was bragging rights to being "participants" (leaving out just what passive participants we were), I’ll have to look for something else for middle school.