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 TU students prepare for zero-gravity
flight.
While some college students spend summers dipping
ice cream, four TU students are preparing for a zero-gravity flight
aboard NASA's KC-130 research jet, affectionately known as the
"vomit comet."
During two flights in July, the students will
test an experiment their TU team is developing to go up in the Space
Shuttle as part of NASA's JOVE joint-venture research program. The
experiment is expected to get a berth on the shuttle within the next
year or two.
The experiment, dubbed "Space Balls," will
record the interactions and clustering patterns of clouds of tiny
ball bearings. The researchers expect the data to increase our
understanding of how matter behaves in outer space, which could shed
new light on the formation of celestial bodies.
TU physics
professor Michael Wilson is mentor to the project, which otherwise
relies on undergraduate students to design, fabricate, program, and
test the apparatus; develop models for analyzing data; and
coordinate activities with NASA.
In addition, these students
are demonstrating that weightlessness can be part of the
"heavy-duty" education that you get only at TU.
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