Gravity 101:
UVM students dabble in weightlessness in NASA engineering program
By Scott Sutherland
Free Press Correspondent
The Burlington Free Press, March 19, 1999

        The motel room on the southern fringe of town looks like any other invaded by college students on spring break: backpacks, sandals, textbooks and coolers lay scattered about the room, along with the remains of last night's dinner, discretely tucked away in Styrofoam to-go boxes.

        But there's an assortment of additional gear that suggests these particular students aren't here merely to enjoy the glorious south Texas springtime. Tool kits, volt meters, spools of wire and bits of electronics are piled here and, there. Glass vials teeming with fruit flies cover one end of the bathroom countertop.
        And in a corner near the door stands an impressive, complicated looking piece of machinery, a 4-foot-tall, multi-tiered aluminum tower bristling with wires, Plexiglas enclosures and electronic circuitry - not exactly the kind of thing you pack for a day trip down to the beaches at Galveston.
        That tower is the reason a team of mechanical engineering seniors from the University of Vermont is in Houston, and why the team accompanied by a couple hundred fruit flies - will experience zero-gravity aboard a NASA training aircraft later this week.

Dan Cheung, a mechanical engineering senior at the University of Vermont, demonstrates how his team's zero gravity tower works during the experiment review as Steve Feaster, a NASA pilot, looks on.
        Noel Nutting of Essex junction, Megan Carroll of Vineyard Haven, Mass., Dan Cheung of Roslyn Heights, N.Y., and Dan Barnett of Asbury, N.J., are participating in NASA's 1999 Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, a project that allows teams of undergraduates from colleges around the country to conduct scientific experiments in an environment of zero gravity, otherwise known as weightlessness.

Zero gravity

        The team, under the supervi-sion of Mark Miller, a doctoral stu-dent in mechanical engineering at UVM, will experience weight-lessness with the tower, which will house and monitor the activity of more than 200 fruit flies. The team hopes the experiment will contrib-ute to the scientific community's understanding of the links be-tween metabolism and aging.
        The students, assisted by Miller and their teacher, Tony Keller' spent about six weeks this winter building the experiment – which Miller fondly calls "the rocket," even though it's designed as pay-load to be carried by rocket or air-craft - from scratch, following a design process that lasted 18 months.
        "I'm very impressed with the work the students have done," said Keller, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who also advises Miller's work. "Too many undergraduate design projects are limited to pen and paper, which is why hands-on projects like this one are so beneficial. The students learn so much more about deci-sion-making and basic engineering concepts when they actually have to build something that works."

Dan Barnett (right), a mechanical engineering senior at UVM, watches as Dave Finney (left),deputy chiefof aircraft operations for NASA, examines the UVM team's tower during the review process.
        The project began two years ago when Miller, 29, an Iowa na-tive with an aerospace engineering degree from the University of Col-orado, received a $34,000 grant from NASA's Student Launch Pro-gram to develop an experiment that would study the effects of zero gravity on fruit flies. The tower would be transported in the nose cone of a Nike-Orion rocket fired at NASA's Wallops Island fa-cility in Virginia, and would sub-ject the flies - drosophila melano-gaster - to between five and 10 minutes of weightlessness.
        The project is slated to launch in July.

All work, no play

        In the fall of 1997, students in a special topics course in mechanical engineering, co-taught by Miller and Keller, were given the daunting task of designing the experiment. The tower had to include enclosures for the flies, complex electronics to monitor their movements and store the data, heating and cooling systems to ensure a consistent environment, lighting, and its own power supply - and it had to fit inside a Nike-Orion nose cone and be able to withstand the tremendous G-forces of a rocket launch.
        The design work continued into last fall, when Keller suggested that the students apply to NASA's competitive zero-gravity program. Their submission was one of 22 accepted for the current session, which runs March 8 through Saturday at NASA's Ellington Field facility and includes experiments ranging from mineral separation to the behavior of mechanical joints.

University of Vermont mechanical engineering seniors Dan Barnett (right, in T-shirt) and Dan Cheung (front) wait as NASA officials look over and approve their zero gravity experiment recently.
          That gave the students less than two months to fabricate the tower from scratch. "There were too many anxious moments to count," said Nutting, recalling the down-to-the-wire race to finish the project for the Houston trip. "We hardly slept or ate that last week -we were in the shop constantly."
        Cheung said the process was slowed by time-consuming - but essential - trial and error. "The design for the fly chambers was always changing," he said. "You'd spend 10 hours working in the shop only to realize that what you'd just made wouldn't work and that it had to be completely redesigned."
         Final approval on design and fabrication had to come from Keller, whom Carroll credits with the tower's extremely well-made elegance. "He's a total perfectionist," she said. "One of his rules was, 'No duct tape.'"
        The students loaded the finished project - sans duct tape aboard a van and made the two-day drive to Houston. They unloaded the tower at Ellington's Building 990, an enormous hangar used as a repair and servicing area for NASA aircraft, as well as to house the KC-135A, a converted Air Force tanker aircraft used for zero-gravity training.

Oxygen deprivation

        The students' first week consisted of setting up shop amid the high-tech bustle of the hangar, attending KC-135A safety training classes (which culminated with a session in a hypobaric chamber that produces the dizzying and disorienting effects of being without supplemental oxygen at 25,000 feet). Students toured the Johnson Space Center and heard astronauts discuss shuttle missions and space station progress.
        The students received their first bits of outside feedback on their project March 11, when it was reviewed by zero-gravity program officials as part of NASA's Test Readiness Review. There was a crackle of nervous tension in the hangar as the officials moved from project to project, asking questions and taking notes.
        "Cheung," Nutting said. "You nervous?"
        "Naw," said Cheung, who would lead UVM's presentation. "It's no big deal."
        "Yeah," said Nutting, relaxing. "We know this thing by heart."
        The reviewers finally circled the UVM project, and Cheung gave them an overview of the experiment and how the tower was constructed. Most of the reviewers studied the rocket, nodding slowly, and a couple of them raised safety questions about exposed wingnuts and the sharp corners of an auxiliary power supply. The tower was approved for flight, and everyone breathed a little easier.
        Later that afternoon, John Yaniec, test director for the KC-135A and lead reviewer, was surprised to learn the students had built the project themselves - he thought they had borrowed a sophisticated piece of gear to run their fruit fly experiments.
        "This is typical of the kind of hardware we see from the NASA researchers," Yaniec said, impressed. "(The KC-135A flight) will be a great way for them to fine-tune the experiment and ensure a better chance of success with the rocket launch."

The Vomit Comet

        The TRR and the successful completion of the KC-135A safety course were the final hurdles en route to the ultimate prize: a three-hour ride on the KC-135A, which includes about 15 minutes of weightlessness and an additional 15-20 minutes of near weightlessness.
        Today and Saturday, the students will load the tiny flies into their chambers, bolt the tower to the floor of the aircraft, and three of them -Nutting, Cheung and Barnett - will don flight suits and prepare for weightlessness.
        The plane creates zero gravity in the open, padded cabin by flying a series of steep, rolling arcs between 25,000 and 35,000 feet, with zero-gravity conditions existing for about 20 seconds at the top of each arc. The plane will fly 40 arcs over the Gulf of Mexico before returning to Ellington Field.
        The flight, not surprisingly, can be very unpleasant for passengers prone to motion sickness - the plane is nicknamed the "Weightless Wonder," but it's better known as the "Vomit Comet" - which is why safety course instructors provided, detailed instructions in the use of airsickness bags ("Stuff floats up there, guys, and then it lands, and then it's a big mess," one instructor cautioned, "so really clamp those bags tight to your face") and urged fliers to use a powerful anti-motion sickness drug concocted by NASA.
        The potential rigors of the flights notwithstanding, the students can't wait to float in the name of science -and in the name of pure adventure.
        "The experiment is obviously why we're here, but having a chance to go up in the KC-135 is a great opportunity," Barnett said. "Everybody wonders what it would be like to be weightless, but we're actually going to find out."

Scott Sutherland, a writer in Portland, Maine, is accompanying the students in Houston for UVM Quarterly, the university '  alumni magazine. An account of the students' weightless flight will appear in late March in the Free Press.

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