Tuesday, March 13: Flight time, weightless footballs and glass crisis

Through impenetrable fog we made our way to Ellington Field at 7 a.m., today’s flyers suited up in green flight suits.

Shannon (Kolensky), Matt, and myself, the alternate lucky enough to have landed a seat on the plane, were nervous and excited. We all ate bagels for breakfast, a pretty safe choice for our stomachs.

The team immediately began preparations upon arrival. We had placed the particles in the chamber last night, and now we began pumping out the air left in the chamber and replacing it with argon.

We flyers were tied up most of the early hours with briefings on the day’s events and such. After all flyers were called to the office to receive medication we were sent away again because fog was delaying takeoff.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team was hard at work in the plane with our adviser and NASA mentor, making last minute adjustments to the experiment. Finally the flyers received medication, a combination of a depressant that suppresses motion sickness and a stimulant to counteract the other drug’s tiring effects.

Several people then briefed us, including the flight surgeon and test directors. I was getting pretty dizzy from the medicine, and actually had to concentrate on walking normally. Then we all walked outside to meet the rest of our teams for departure.

The flyers walked single-file out to the plane, past the camera crew. We stowed any items we had brought on the plane in the compartments above our heads and then took our seats. The flight surgeon came around with candy because the medicine causes dryness in the mouth.

Several minutes after takeoff we were allowed out of our seats, so we began preparations on the experiment, powering up the RF generator and turning on cameras. The test directors counted the minutes to the first parabola, and we positioned ourselves against the walls for the first 1.8-g segment of the flight.

The engine roared louder than ever, and then all of a sudden went quiet. My stomach leaped into my chest like when cresting the hill on a roller coaster. Then the feeling went away and we found ourselves slowly drifting upwards.

I pushed off the ground, way too hard, and hit the padded ceiling quickly. This was microgravity. I looked at my teammates in awe, Shannon’s hair flying everywhere.

Before we knew it, the directors called “feet down, coming out” and we felt ourselves pulled to the ground. The heaviness ensued once again as we rounded out the bottom of the flight path.

Again the familiar rumble followed by silence, a heart leap and we were weightless once more. I kicked my legs and they began traveling in directions I did not intend for them to go. Only the straps on the walls prevented me from flying off into our experiment or that of another team.

On the third parabola we began our experiment. I held the clipboard to keep track of parabolas and record the pressure in the chamber. Matt worked the computer software for the Langmuir probe, and Shannon manned the generator.

So caught up in my work on the clipboard, I did not notice when the problems began. The power had been accidentally changed on the generator, which was easily fixable. More significant, however, was the malfunctioning Langmuir probe. It stopped collecting data. As long as the cameras were on getting visual data on the particles in the plasma, though, our experiment was fine.

After ten parabolas we had a five minute break as the plane turned around. The camera crew was constantly floating around from team to team during zero G. During the next set, my teammates began to feel a bit queasy. They didn’t move around as much during 1.8 g, when people feel sick if at all.

I have always loved roller coasters and such, so I loved every minute and felt fine. I’m sure the medicine helped too. After the second turnaround Shannon went back to our seats to get the outreach material.

Over the next ten parabolas we threw around a football signed by Joe Paterno, and played with a Slinky. These will be used for outreach in middle school classroom activities. The videographer came by and put a microphone on Matt. In zero G he spoke about our experiment to the camera. Shannon and Matt played with the football for the camera and I showed the slinky in zero G for the camera.

Next we moved on to a lunar gravity parabola (1/6 Earth gravity), and then a Martian parabola (1/3 Earth gravity). It was fun to do push ups and jump around in these environments. You were aware of your weight, but not nearly as inhibited by it as on Earth.

Before we knew it the parabolas were over and we had to return to our seats. I was extremely sad. No words could ever really describe what I had just felt, but I knew just how special an opportunity it was.

Nearly everyone slept on the short flight back to Ellington. Still high on excitement, I was wide awake. The camera crew left first and positioned themselves at the bottom of the plane to capture us as we descended the steps to cheers from our fellow team members. At the nose of the plane the whole flight group posed for a picture.

We had to go inside for a quick debriefing, and new flyers had to fill out a form for the flight surgeon. Ours was the seventeenth “no kill” flight for the program, meaning nobody threw up, so we got to sign a copy of our flight picture for the office. Matt, Shannon, and I then met up with the rest of our team and returned to the hangar.

The plane was brought back in and we went inside to work on the experiment. The source meter was still giving us problems, and we decided to secure it outside of the experiment structure for tomorrow’s flight.

It performed better, but still did not give the desired data. We took out the chamber and other pieces we would need to bring with us to prepare the chamber for the next flight.

After packing it all up, we headed home, stopping at Subway for the famished flyers. Trials and tribulations were not over yet, however.

After watching the video taken by the camera we set up, nearly everyone was relaxing. Then I heard the bad news—in an effort to clean out the chamber, the glass had been cracked on an end piece, right up to the threading. Panicking, we called everyone we knew who could possibly help us, and we began frantically searching online for places in the area that could help us.

Finally Shannon found a glass blower, who agreed to wait in his shop for us. We drove there as fast as we could, running into traffic. It pained us to hear the cracking of glass as he examined the piece and pulled the metal rod out of the glass.

He said he would make a new piece if it couldn’t be fixed. We stopped at Lowe’s on our way back, to gather supplies for a plan B, should the glass blower not work out.

After returning home, the team went to T.G.I. Friday’s for dinner to just unwind after all the stress. Some of us are leaving at 6a.m. to pick up the piece from the glassblower tomorrow and others are flying, so it’s an early night for everyone.