Microgravity Research at Carthage

In April 2008, Professor of Physics and Computer Science Kevin Crosby and students Caitlin Pennington ('09), Brad Frye ('10), Emily Sorensen ('10), Isa Fritz ('10), and Erin Martin ('09) boarded a modified C-9 aircraft at Ellington Field near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, and experienced the ride of their lives aboard NASA's Weightless Wonder. 

 

The team was selected to participate in the NASA Systems Engineering Education Discovery Program, The SEED Program pairs NASA researchers with faculty-student teams tasked with designing and building experiments in support of NASA mission research priorities.  The two days of flight culminated several months of work to design and build an experiment to study the efficiency of inertial filtration of lunar dust for use in future lunar habitats.  The microgravity flights, used to train astronauts for working in a bweightless environment, provided a total of 64 parabolas over the Gulf of Mexico.  Each parabola provides roughly 30 seconds of weightessness or lunar gravity conditions.

The team spent 12 days in Houston preparing their experiment for flight and receiving training on the physiological effects of weightlessness and hypoxia. As part of the hypoxia training, flight teams spent time in the hypobaric chamber at the ohnson Space Flight Center, where they learned to anticipate their individual responses to hypoxia (oxygen deprivation). The pressure in the chamber was gradually decreased to the equivalent atmoshperic pressure at 25,000 feet above sea level.