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| One Wild Ride |
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Aerospace engineering students Alexis Larson and Felipe Sediles enjoy a moment of weightlessness
(Foto: Courtesy of NASA
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Syracuse University Magazine) |
JONATHAN HAY | While some students enjoy wild rides at amusement parks, a team of five students from the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) went on an adventure last summer that no roller coaster could match. The students spent 10 days in Houston as part of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program at the Johnson Space Center. While in Houston, four of the team members flew in the KC-135, a microgravity jet nicknamed the “Weightless Wonder” that flies in a parabolic flight path, creating 20 seconds of weightlessness on each dive. “The plane pitches and you go to two G’s heading up, and then
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it comes over the top and descends,” says team member Reid Thomas ’02, an aerospace engineering major. “As soon as it begins heading down, you lift off the floor. The first time it happens you’re thinking, ‘Holy cow!’”
The ECS team was one of 29 chosen from a nationwide pool of college and university applicants who submitted proposals for microgravity experiments. SU’s experiment was to analyze the microstructure of the metal gallium when solidified in a microgravity environment. During the zero-gravity parts of the flight, the SU students cooled liquefied gallium to see if the lack of gravity changed the metal’s microstructural properties. The students are now examining the metal samples under an electron microscope at SU and will report their findings to NASA. Thomas was joined on the team by aerospace engineering majors Alexis Larson ’03, Matt McCarthy ’02, and Felipe Sediles ’02, the team leader, and mechanical engineering major Pepe Palafox ’02.
Before taking the flight, the team had eight days of preparation that included physiological training, lectures, seminars, and a Test Readiness Review (TRR). During the TRR, the team was questioned by an eight-person NASA committee of flight and safety personnel, who examined an outline of the experiment to ensure that it was safe to fly on the KC-135. The physiological training featured a trip to an altitude chamber, where for five minutes each participant breathed the amount of oxygen that would be available in a 25,000-foot-high environment while working on a written test containing simple math problems and puzzles. The oxygen deprivation caused some interesting reactions from the team. “My whole body tingled, and Alexis burst into laughter,” says Sediles, who had been an intern at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. “People from NASA asked us questions that I thought I answered right away, but when we watched a video of it afterward, there was a long pause.”
Team OranGe joined four other schools on their flights. Two students from each team flew on assigned days. McCarthy and Thomas flew one day, while Larson and Sediles went the next. Each flight was scheduled to complete 32 parabolas, and out of those 32, each SU team needed to perform the experiment 14 times. The experiment succeeded in solidifying 10 out of 28 gallium samples in the microgravity environment. “The first time we went weightless, I got so disoriented,” Larson says. “We used the first few parabolas to adjust to the new environment. After the floating part, the flight directors shouted through the cabin ‘feet down,’ so that when gravity came back you would be sure to land on your feet in a safe place.”
Sediles, who would one day like to be an astronaut, says the experience was phenomenal. “We got a chance to meet astronauts, tour the Johnson Space Center, do the flight, and conduct our experiment,” he says. “It was an amazing opportunity that we all appreciated.”
Syracuse University Magazine (Primavera, 2002)
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