Students from Lamar University will experience weightlessness on flights aboard NASA’s Weightless Wonder this week as part of the space agency’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program.
The Lamar students will fly Thursday and Friday aboard NASA’s C-9B aircraft. The flights will be the sixth time Lamar University has been represented in the competitive national program, and the seventh time LU students have gone weightless since 1995 when LU students had opportunity to fly an experiment aboard NASA’s reduced-gravity aircraft after selection in a state program called Students Understanding Reduced Gravity.
The Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program provides a unique academic experience for undergraduate students to successfully propose, design, fabricate, fly and evaluate a reduced-gravity experiment of their choice over the course of six months. The overall experience includes scientific research, hands-on experimental design, test operations and educational/public outreach activities.
The reduced-gravity aircraft generally flies 30 parabolic maneuvers over the Gulf of Mexico. This parabolic pattern provides about 30 seconds of hypergravity (about 1.8G-2G) as the plane climbs to the top of the parabola. Once the plane starts to “nose over” the top of the parabola to descend toward Earth, the plane experiences about 25 seconds of microgravity (0G).
The team was selected to fly in 2005, but the NASA program change from the venerable KC-135 aircraft to the C-9 resulted in deferment of flights until summer 2006. The agency retired its KC-135 aircraft after 10 years of service and nearly 35,000 parabolas experienced by more than 18,000 passengers – including 2,010 students from 460 college teams.
Lamar’s students traveled to Ellington AFB south of Houston on July 6 to begin training for the flights.
“Five of the students are seeking minors in Space Science in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, and are planning to have careers in space science after graduation,” said Jim Jordan, professor and chair of the department.
Flying for Lamar are Richard Wooten, a physic major; Chase Williams, an electrical engineering and physics major; Michael Hennigan, a physics major; Johnathan Sterling, an electrical engineering and physics major. Linsey Lewis, an education major, will serve as alternate.
Jared Mills, a general studies major, and Erica Williams, a political science major, will serve as ground crew for the team. George Irwin, associate professor of physics, and Jordan are faculty advisors for the team.
The LU team will perform experiments to measure the electromagnetic responses from powders consisting of magnetized and non-magnetized particles subject to alternating current and direct current applied fields under reduced gravity.
In 2003, the university flew a similar experiment that gave strong evidence that the response signal from the magnetized particles varied in different gravitational conditions, while the signal from non-magnetized particles showed no such G-force dependence. The team hopes to obtain similar data for a series of samples consisting of a mixture of non-magnetized and magnetized particles in order to study the transition between G-force dependent and non-dependent behavior, and compare with the results of models. They will also investigate the G-force dependence of magnetic resonance-like behavior in the magnetized particle sample, based on measurement of the effect in 1-G conditions.