UW students earn ride on NASA’s zero-gravity plane

Four UW–Madison students have earned a research trip to NASA this spring to experience life in the queasy world of zero gravity.

Patrick McKenna, Maria Spector, Marty Harms and Glenn Groeschel, all students in the department of engineering mechanics and astronautics, will be among 48 college teams nationwide to run an experiment aboard NASA’s “weightless” training simulator. NASA offers the program at Johnson Space Center in Houston to give college students a rare educational experience.

The student tests will run from March 16-28.

The reduced-gravity simulator could be seen as a frequent flyer’s idea of a bad joke. The revamped Boeing 707, which features a heavily padded fuselage for passengers, flies over the Gulf Coast, doing a series of 35 dives that produce a state of near-weightlessness inside the plane.

While the simulator trains budding astronauts for space travel, it also provides brief windows for studies on the effects of microgravity. The student teams chosen by NASA will run experiments looking at microgravity’s effects on everything from candle flames to lava eruptions.

The UW–Madison team will produce a form of polystyrene that is created when chloroform and methanol are mixed together. McKenna says the group hopes to find whether the altered environment will affect the structure or density of the material.

Materials research is likely to take off in space with the construction of an international space station, McKenna says. “The main thing we’re trying to prove is that materials perform differently in microgravity, and it’s something that should be researched more,” he says.

Each weightless dive during the two-hour flight lasts about 30 seconds, so experiments have to be designed to take advantage of short intervals of microgravity. The Wisconsin Center for Space Automation and Robotics will lend the UW–Madison engineers its test bench, which is designed to secure equipment for weightless work. Robert Yetka, a researcher with WCSAR, is serving as advisor for the team.

Although the students will get physical training before taking the trip, McKenna says air sickness is an all-too-common complication. “It’s definitely something they plan for,” he says. “They have boxes of air sickness bags ready.”

McKenna has received advice from past participants on how reduce queasiness, including wearing a patch over one eye or closing his eyes during descents. “I think I’m just going to go on and have fun,” he says. “I’ve always enjoyed roller-coaster rides, and this is the best one I could possibly imagine.”

NASA has operated the weightless training environment since 1959, but only recently extended the equipment to government, commercial and academic use.

For more information on NASA’s student flight opportunities, see its web site at http://www.csr.utexas.edu/tsgc/floatn/