On June 9, 2009, I had the opportunity to experience microgravity aboard NASA’s Microgravity University outreach program. This account follows what the Dusty Plasma Team-II (DPX-II) and I did in our time at the Johnson Space Center and Ellington Field where the flight was from. In addition to microgravity, we had the convenience of “flying” in a hypobaric chamber to 25,000 ft, toured the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and inspected our country’s progress toward the 2019 Moonshot.
I collected thoughts on the experience, some of the neat things I saw, as well as a short discussion of our experiment.
EDIT: WIRED.com did a feature on us here!
Our experiment is worth a small introduction. We began in November 2008 with an application to NASA for the flight. Application is open to national US undergraduate universities that require microgravity for an experiment. It’s a competitive process that determines who has a good plan to make good science in microgravity. Out of 70 teams that apply, less than 30 make it to Houston. This preliminary process determines whether your team has “the right stuff” to complete a project in the time allotted and an experiment worth being placed in microgravity.
The physicists on the team had flown a similar experiment in the previous year, and it had done well. They changed some of their science, and wanted to build it better, so they recruited two mechanical engineers (Chris and I). Our team works in conjunction with an adviser, Dr. Andrew Zwicker, at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. I worked closely with my The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) engineering adviser, Bijan Sepahpour. During our preparation, we were able to draw on PPPL’s and TCNJ’s resources in order to complete the project.
We had to wait a while before we heard back from NASA, especially since the entire program was set to be axed by Congressional budget cuts. I wish I knew why Congress hates science so much.
After being accepted, we had one of two flight dates to choose from; April and June. We chose the latter. The last month leading up to our departure was very hectic. I was heading the construction of this project, as well as wrapping up TCNJ’s entry in the 2009 Solar Splash Competition. In fact, the day after that I came back from the Solar Splash Competition in Arkansas (a 24 hour drive) I had boarded a plane for Houston, TX.
Making Dust Float
The basic premise of our experiment was to visualize the behavior of dust in plasma during microgravity. Plasma is the stuff that stars, lightning, and neon signs are made of. Scientists are interested in this because of certain industrial processes performed with semiconductors and the majority of the stuff in the known universe is plasma. It’s the most abundant state of matter, and holds some really interesting promises for generating massive amounts of power in the future. How did we study this? We start with a small vacuum chamber with two electrodes in it that are held at a potential of about 400 V, 1-2 mA. Dust is placed in the chamber, and a vacuum is pulled to about .1 Torr (atmospheric pressure is 760 Torr). The chamber is backfilled with a Argon, and a plasma forms. The dust floats inside the plasma (more correctly a DC Glow Discharge) by the effects of gravity and the electrodes. The shape of the dust cloud changes in microgravity, which is one of the more interesting phenomenon that the physicists are interested in. Data is then collected by two video cameras (one wide and narrow angle) that is fed live into a desktop computer. To visualize the shape of the 3-D dust cloud, we use a laser sheet that illuminates a 2-D cross section. During the flight, we planned on modifying the voltage, chamber pressure, and position of the laser.
In order to fly with NASA, we had to prove two things. First, we had to accomplish the goal collecting data on the behavior of dusty plasma. Second, and more importantly, the design had to maximize safety for the occupants of the aircraft by conforming to their regulations on size and permissible equipment. So in several last submissions to NASA, the design was proven to complete these two objectives and documented as such.
Now, this is a lot of equipment, and our final apparatus reflects this. It ended up weighing 295 lbs, just short of the 300 lbs NASA limitation. Aluminum extrusions were used for the skeleton. The largest offenders of weight was the dry vacuum pump (67 lbs) and computer (27lbs).
The project had shipped ahead of us packed by the shipping gods at PPPL in a 600 lb (!!!) wood container directly to Ellington Field.
Ellington Field
Our time over the two weeks our team spent in Houston was filled with NASA activities and tours, preparing the experiment, or sleeping. We had ample work to do before our flight since the entire experiment had to be assembled and last minute pilot tests completed at Ellington Field. The aircraft hanger and field that we worked out of was where the flight would be coming from and housed the NASA Microgravity Office. We shared a hanger with a WB-57F, a high altitude weather reconnaissance jet that is one of two still operating in the world. It can hold 6,000 lbs in cargo to a flight ceiling in excess of 60,000 ft (~11.4 miles!!) Just outside our hanger was the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, a heavily modified Boeing 747 to ferry the shuttle from alternative landing sites back to the Shuttle Landing Facility.
Some of the more important pre-flight activities for the experiment included a Test Readiness Review (TRR) that was the final safety check performed by 20 NASA engineers and specialists.
Hypobaric chamber
NASA Microgravity University is unique in that we are not just passengers, but considered flight teams and mission crew. As part of the team’s-flight activities, NASA requires that participants get an FAA flight physical and be well versed in emergency procedures for the flight. This includes knowing how to find and use the oxygen hoods in the event of cabin decompression. As an extra measure, they put us through a standard hypoxia training profile in a hypobaric chamber. This simulates the decrease in atmospheric pressure and oxygen that one would see at 25,000 feet, which is 4000 feet below Mt. Everest’s 29,029 ft summit. At 25,000 feet, the air pressure is 37.65 kPa (sea level is 101.33 kPA).
The “flight” transition to this altitude where they decrease the chamber’s pressure can cause quite a bit of discomfort in the ears. The Valsalva maneuver is recommended, and was taught to us by the staff in addition to other information about what happens to our bodies in this environment. The chamber sat approximately 14 of us at a time, so the groups were split up. We were fitted with flight masks and “snoopy” caps that would give us communication in the chamber. After getting to 25,000 ft in about 15 minutes, we were told to remove our flight masks that had been feeding us 100% Oxygen. We were to identify our symptoms of hypoxia and complete as much of a worksheet as possible. It had some math on it, silly visual illusions, and places to write the presidents or our names. Hypoxia symptoms include feeling giddy and lack of judgement. I felt fine, but other than some flatulence (little fart becomes very big and wants out because of the drop in pressure) After about the three minute mark, I didn’t feel like doing the math problems or much of anything. After five minutes, the masks go back on, and then they bring us back down. The supervisors of this test have great fun identifying people that “aren’t all there” and tend to say silly things. The fellow next to me seemed like he was getting aggressive after he tried to take a swing at me with his fist right before our masks went back on. Reactions due to lack of oxygen vary greatly.
The Flight
Microgravity can be had in three ways: falling, orbiting, and getting really far away from any gravitational source. Getting in orbit or away from the earth costs a few billion right now, so that’s out. The best way then (not in a vacuum) is to fall by putting an airplane temporarily in freefall.
The government has this little policy to make every effort to outsource services to other companies. So with the introduction of the Zero-G Corporation, NASA no longer runs their own microgravity flights aboard the KC-135 Stratotanker. Zero-G is famous for running 15-parabola $5,000 flights for anyone with the cash aboard a 727. No problem, right? Well, NASA has experience behind them for one. There is a certain “quality” of parabola that one must hit to simply make a good microgravity environment and good science. The trick is to impart as little acceleration to the apparatus inside the cabin. And I think that our data may show that the NASA pilots may be better, but it’s too early to speak yet.
In the morning, we don our flight suits, get a briefing, and board the aircraft. It really moves quite quickly. The entire flight over the Gulf of Mexico only lasts about 90 minutes, and we have 30 parabolas to do our work. As a bonus we do Moon (awesome!) and Mars gravity (less awesome!) on the last two parabolas. The majority of the cabin that we work in has 1-in. padding and the passenger seats in the back. There are about 6 teams on board with three people each in addition to NASA and Zero-G personnel. The NASA staff, in blue flight suits, act as the “enforcers” that look for people doing stupid things (like not getting down when we are about to lose microgravity) or holding down sick people. The weightlessness we experience is about 0.1 of earth’s gravity. The moon is 0.165-g and Mars is 0.376-g of our nominal 1-g living conditions.
Before the flight, they also give us a gem of a medicine: SCOP-DEX. It’s a JSC-only available mixture of 0.8mg Scopolamine and 5mg of Dexedrine. It’s basically an upper and a downer that is supposed to counteract the effects of motion sickness. While this is very effective, the downer tends to hit you later and knocks you out for the rest of the day.
Microgravity
Probably one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.
Microgravity is a funny thing. It hits some harder than others and in unpredictable ways. We were told many times to eat our normal breakfasts. “But then you’ll vomit!” Exactly. You WANT to vomit. You want your body to do it’s thing that is ingrained in our bodily functions because its’ unhappy. After that, you feel better. And surrounding monkeys won’t eat what you ate this morning because that food will make them sick.
So… I lost my breakfast twice on the flight. I didn’t miss a parabola stuck in a seat in the back, though. Pulled out my vomit bag, lost what I needed to, and then continued having fun. It’s a weird little panic that sets in. “Shit, I’m gonna puke… Gotta puke. Gotta puke.” And you don’t think of the convenient vomit bags tucked away in your flight suit. So you scramble around a little bit and then remember you are prepared for this. Sit down, hold the bag with two hands, and a NASA staffer in a blue flight suit will hold you down. It actually stays in the little flight bag pretty well through the microgravity portion since there isn’t much acceleration imparted on things to go anywhere.
Enough talking about that.
Aside from that… damn. That was really fun. Microgravity is made of smiles and puppy dog tails. You look around slowly with everyone floating and working feverishly, and you can’t imagine extending this experience into the weeks that the astronauts preform. It’s incredible. There’s no way being weightless could ever be routine. I could do it forever. It is not comparable to SCUBA diving, or anything that I have ever experienced. I took time to enjoy it and thought carefully about what was going on, but it still went too quickly. At 20 to 25 seconds per microgravity parabola, it doesn’t last forever.
Interacting with objects is the most fun. Imparting spins on things and watching them go or just snatching things out of the air. We missed two flying object debris hazards in our preparation, but I grabbed them as they left the experimental enclosure and put them away in the flight suit.
I couldn’t concentrate on anything with the experiment and depended heavily on my amazing teammates. Anytime I looked at a knob, I would get this tunnel vision that made everything spin. So I kept my gaze distant and not focus on anything in particular. I goofed around a little for the photographer. All of the new people chose to lie down during the 2-g portion, but the flight photographers toughed it out and stood up. I can’t imagine what that feels like.
Other sights
Part of Microgravity University is showing how great NASA is (which it is). Some of the better things I got to see was a ready-to-fly Saturn V rocket on display. Absolutely huge. I’m glad that the new Constellation program is returning to these massive rockets. We also saw the mission control rooms for the ISS, shuttle, and the Apollo program that coordinate with other rooms around the world. STS-125 had just returned on a Hubble repair mission in the previous week, so there was a crowd in the control room hanging the traditional mission plaque.
Celebration in Mission Control
Robonaut!
THE consoles where flight engineers sat during from Apollo all the way through some of the shuttle flights (really!)
Cigar smoke from our nation’s moon landings still permeated everything in the Apollo Mission Control. In the corner is a flag that went to the moon and came back. NASA has quite an artifact collection.
Neutral Buoyancy Lab
Wow. A 6.2 million gallon (202 x 102 x 40ft) indoor pool built in a hanger that’s only one third below ground. And it is home to a the International Space Station 1:1 training mock-up minus the solar panels. Like everything else in NASA, there are alot of stories passed around about the pool lab. “Took a month to fill. Enough cement to fill 500 trucks for miles.” I think the key to NASA culture is separating the ‘tales’ from the facts, but it’s such an attractive part about NASA.
We didn’t have the luck of seeing any astronauts train in the facility, but they were removing the Hubble Telescope mock-up that the astronauts had been training on. The facility was home to several other mock-ups of the shuttle that were equally amazing. I got to sit in a shuttle flight chair that I assume that it becomes more comfortable when hitting 3 g’s on launch.
I welcome any questions from new teams. I learned a lot that I didn’t record in this account, but would be happy to share. Contact me with the form on the top of the page.
Further Reading
Our PPPL advisor’s blog about the trip: Science Edumacation
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
$5000 flight. A portable plasma lab. Bijan’s oversight….and the sucker is still held together with duct tape……
Looks like you guys had a lot of fun.