Students gravitate at zero By SHAUN SCHAFERWorld Staff Writer
7/28/2002
HOUSTON -- Matt Olson and Rebecca Ragar stepped out of the starboard door aft of the wing on NASA's KC-135, a highly modified jet, and walked down the stairs.
The two University of Tulsa students had just spent a good part of the previous two hours flying between 38,000 feet and 19,000 feet, either floating in the cabin weightless for short periods or flattened to the floor at nearly two times their normal weight.
They may not have looked it, but they were emerging triumphant.
The flight left them tired and retching, but had allowed them to operate an experiment on granular activity that could help expand science's understanding of how parts of the solar system were formed.
It was 11:30 a.m. Wednesday as the last two fliers from TU's team stood in front of the four-engined Boeing jet for a quick photo.
There were no shouts of triumph.
Three cheers and hurrahs at the end of a mission are the sort of things that happen in fiction, and this was science.
Instead of victory shouts, it was business as usual.
Even before landing, the other members of the TU team participating in NASA's reduced gravity flight program, July 18 through Saturday, were trying to figure out ways to improve the experiment for another shot next year. TU also has room on the Space Shuttle, meaning the experiment operated this past week in Houston could be on its way to space sometime in 2004.
After two flights in two days, the discussions focused on moving fans, adjusting circuits, adding components, subtracting components -- anything to make TU's custom-designed shaker shake a little bit better and to guarantee even more data the next time it goes aloft.
"We learned a lot," team leader Justin Mitchell said after the second flight. "We learned some things to do differently next time."
Ups and downs: First on that list might be additional sleep.
The group as a whole operated on a sleep deficiency right up until that last flight.
A few hours after it was over, all but one team member was asleep back at the Quality Inn Motel, south of the KC-135's home at Ellington Field.
The strained schedule of Tuesday and Wednesday's flights provides a pretty good sample of how science is neither antiseptic nor for the sedentary.
While flying the experiment for the first time on Tuesday, the team ran into a number of problems. A circuit overheated, shutting down the shaker motor and eventually the lights.
The experiment operated for about 12 of the plane's 42 zero-gravity-producing parabolas.
An infrared signal to the experiments' cameras also failed after only a few minutes of operation.
The moments of weightlessness are coveted by the team because they allow their experiment to work.
During the weightless portion of the flight, the TU Gr.A.I.N.S. project -- short for granular agglomeration in non-gravitating systems -- shook a sapphire box with multiple chambers. Each chamber contained from a few hundred to thousands of tiny, brass spheres.
Arcane? Not entirely.
The way those balls moved in the absence of gravity might explain how dust settles to form asteroids and how the rings around planets form.
Try it again: Weightlessness can be good for experiments and bad for experimenters, the most pressing problems being motion sickness.
Through medication and training, NASA has been able to reduce the incidents of motion sickness from more than one-third to about 10 percent of each flier group, according to test director Dominic Del Rosso.
"It's when the body is getting different signals from the environment," Del Rosso told the group in a pre-flight briefing. "It doesn't know what to do, so your body decides, `I'll barf.' "
Three of the five people sent aloft with the TU experiment suffered from motion sickness.
Both team members flying on Wednesday got sick.
"We got more data, but fewer survivors," Wilson said as Wednesday's flight was landing.
Back on the ground at 11:20 a.m. the previous day, the group had unloaded the experiment and started working on it in the hangar at noon.
They had planned only to remove the cameras and take a look at the data collected, but when fliers Mitchell and Whitney Marshall reported that the experiment stopped operating in mid-flight, the group was forced to dismantle the operation and reassemble it in less than 18 hours.
With a few teammates making a run for takeout sandwiches, the group continued working in the open, hot hangar until 5 p.m.
Then they loaded it back into their van and returned to their motel. By 2 a.m. Wednesday they had repaired the circuit board, and, for good measure, replaced the entire power system, added a remote control to the cameras and put in a 3-inch box fan to cool the components on the board.
Here we go again: By 6:30 a.m. Wednesday they were once more at the hangar.
The day's fliers, Olson and Ragar, arrived a little later, while the rest of the team waited for an OK on their modifications.
Wednesday, Del Rosso walked into the hangar at 7:27 a.m. He looked over the modifications and the support papers that team member Aaron Coyner had amended the night before.
Again, the experiment passed without a hitch. When weighed before loading, it had even dropped 21 pounds from two days earlier. It was 113 pounds of aluminum, carbon fiber, circuits and wires wrapped in a clear lexane shell.
By 8 a.m, it was bolted to the plane's floor.
Olson and Ragar were in NASA Room 993, getting their morning briefing.
The New Deal: In flight, there was constant activity.
As soon as the plane took off, passengers unstrapped from their seats in the back of the plane and moved up to their experiments.
Flights typically carry five groups, and each has some items to check off, install or adjust, preparing for zero-G.
About 20 minutes after departure from Ellington, the cycle of parabolas started.
Once they went weightless, fliers were hanging on, trying to operate experiments and contain their breakfasts.
Some experiments worked like a charm and most people didn't get sick.
Still, things can go wrong.
On the first day for the TU group, the experiment malfunctioned, and team leader Mitchell became ill. On the second day, the experiment appeared to work well, but both crewmembers were incapacitated for a while with motion sickness.
The combination of limited sleep and maximum work appeared to catch them.
"I think that's what ruined us -- no sleep, especially today," Mitchell said.
Fate, however, decided to shuffle the cards and deal the group a new hand on the last set of parabolas.
Problems with other experiments caused the flight to level off and pause.
This gave Olson enough time to get back up and restart the experiment. From the hangar, the ground crew watching the entire flight on a downlink -- caught the return.
"Way to go, Matt," Marshall said. "He's quite the trouper to get back out there."
The ground crew, just minutes earlier, had been conducting the postmortem on the day's experiments.
Suddenly, their data gathering had restarted.
Their interest returned.
"He's a hoss, though, going out like that," Mitchell said, as the group watched a fixed camera downlink that provided only a few details of what was happening on the plane. "I can just see him by the experiment, saying `Oh, I'll just stay here operating the equipment while vomiting into a plastic barf bag.' "
Periods of weightlessness would blot Olson and most of the experiment from view.
A flight surgeon, wearing the blue gloves of a man handling barf bags, passed by the area of Olson and the TU experiment. It wasn't a good sign, but someone spotted Olson's legs next to the experiment box.
"Matt's still there. He's still there," Wilson said.
"He's a beast," Mitchell added.
Down to Earth: Olson and Ragar were undergoing debriefing in Room 993 when the rest of the team clambered onto the plane.
Mitchell, Marshall, Wilson, Coyner, Adrienne McVey and flight alternate Jeremy Cain quickly removed the bolts holding the 28-inch tall experiment, reattached handles to it and brought it back to the hangar.
There they gathered their tools and then headed back to their motel home.
Now they have cameras loaded with images of the tiny, brass balls moving as the plane reached the top of its arcs.
They also have a microprocessor loaded with data on the shaker motor speed at the time.
"We've got a lot of film on the movement as a gas," Wilson said. "It seems that the plane moving in zero-G was still enough to cause some of the ones that should have clustered to gather in a corner."
Analyzing the data, writing for additional grants to fund research and measuring just how each one of those balls moved will come in the following months.
The team, which is losing Olson, its hardware engineer, and Marshall, its software engineer, to graduation, will also have to come up with new members and a new plan of attack.
Ultimately, their data may provide a better understanding of particle movement in the universe and how stellar odds and ends come together to form asteroids and planetary rings.
This week, it brought triumph, frustration, jubilation and exasperation, sometimes in series and sometimes all at once.
HOUSTON -- Leaving gravity behind even for brief periods this past week offered a group of University of Tulsa students an experience unlike any other, and provided the agency that runs the flight program to put a little more luster on its image.
Five members of a TU team rode with their experiment as part of NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program. The program allows participants to engage in a flight mission similar to a trip into orbit, while riding aloft in a KC- 135, a modified version of the Boeing 707, four-engine jet.
The program allows them to conduct experiments in a nearly zero-G or microgravity environment. It also poses the challenges of weightlessness and then returning to two times the amount of gravity in a short span.
"There's nothing in the world quite like it," said Whitney Marshall, who designed the programming for TU's experiment on granular action in zero G. "There's nothing quite like having no sense of up or down."
To produce almost no gravity without leaving the atmosphere, the KC- 135 flies in a series of parabolas. Once over the Gulf of Mexico, which takes about 20 minutes from Houston's Ellington Field, the pilot will take the plane from about 18,000 to about 39,000 feet in a matter of seconds. With the plane in a 45-degree arc, it repeats these in cycles of 10.
Each parabola takes about 85 seconds, and in the top half of the parabola fliers get about 25 seconds of weightlessness.
"We move in an arc like a thrown rock," Marshall said.
To avoid motion sickness, fliers try to float up as gravity lets go.
It helps to move their heads and torsos together, refrain from looking out of either of the two windows in the back and to relax, test director Dominic Del Rosso said.
"If you like roller coasters, you are going to be disappointed," Del Rosso said. "If we do it right, you won't even know."
Those periods made three of the TU fliers ill.
"It feels like you are falling because you are," said Marshall, who weathered 42 parabolas without incident on the group's first flight.