Students Take Flight With NASA’s Reduced Gravity Program

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - Four University of Arkansas students will float through the air and bang into padded walls while working with test tubes full of flying sand and iron filings next week as part of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program.

Physics majors Noel Napieralski, Katrina Bogdon and Ryan Godsey and chemical engineering and mathematical sciences major Christy White, along with Sky and Telescope journalist Kelly Beatty, will join 47 other teams at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston March 6-18 to perform experiments aboard the KC-135A, a plane used to train astronauts and perform scientific experiments in micro-gravity conditions without going into space.

The students will perform their experiments in a 60-foot, foam-padded test area, during a 2-3-hour flight where the airplane banks steeply up and down about 30-35 times. The steep drop will provide about 25 seconds of zero gravity conditions during each downturn.

The student’s proposal, "HAWGS: High Altitude Weightless and Gravitational Separation," will look at how particles sort themselves under reduced gravity conditions.

Many scientists speculate that planetary bodies formed because of gases flowing through their centers, but no one has looked to see if gravity has an impact on the distribution of particles in these bodies, Bogdon said.

The experiment will examine the way particles sort themselves at zero gravity, lunar gravity and Martian gravity, possibly providing insight into the formation of meteorites.

The apparatus used will feature plexiglass tubes filled with four inches of iron filings and sand in different proportions. Each tube will have a piece of plastic tubing connected to it, with air flowing through the particle beds from an air tank attached to air distribution chambers.

The air will flow into the tubes for 20 seconds. Then a plunger will be used to anchor the particles in place until their distribution can be analyzed, Napieralski said.

The test tubes will be housed in four panels bolted onto a large frame with a plywood base that will be bolted to the floor of the airplane. About 40 test tubes can be bolted to each panel.

The students will test 310 different samples on two separate flights using air pumped through the test tubes at different speeds. They will test the distribution at zero gravity, lunar gravity which is 1/6 the earth’s gravity and Martian gravity which is 1/3 the earth’s gravity.

The students learned a lot about working together as a team, and about the creative process, Godsey said. White said finding the materials they could use to build things proved a challenge. They had to know how much force a bolt could withstand, and how all their equipment would hold together under various conditions.

"NASA wants the experimental apparatus to be about as dangerous as a pillow," Godsey said.

The group will undergo about a week of pre-flight training and will work closely with NASA researchers to determine the safety and efficacy of their equipment.

Upon returning to Fayetteville, the students will write up the results of their experiments and offer outreach programs to interested groups in Arkansas.

Funding that made it possible for the students to do this research came from the Fulbright honors program, the departments of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and chemical engineering, the College of Engineering. the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences and the University of Arkansas.

To learn more about the University of Arkansas Flight Opportunity Group and their experiment, please see http://cavern.uark.edu/depts/cosmo/lowg/

For information on NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities, please see

http://www.tsgc.utexas.edu/floatn/march2000/activities.html