By Lee Griffin
The University of Vermont Record, February 12 to 25, 1999

UVM's reputation for offering students down-to-earth, hands-on learning experiences is about to lose ground. Elevating experiential education to the celestial realm, four engineering seniors will be testing their bioengineering experiment - and themselves aboard NASA's KC-135 aircraft, commonly known as the "vomit comet." Their March flight, officially part of the NASA Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities, should snag "most unusual off-campus placement" honors in the annals of career development.

It likely will be the flight of a lifetime for Dan Barnett of Asburg, N.J.; Dan Cheung of Roslyn Heights, N.Y.; Megan Carroll of Vineyard Haven, Mass.; and Noel Nutting of, Essex Junction.

"It's a great opportunity for us to meet with other students and see what they're doing," Carroll said, referring to the other student teams accepted by NASA. Carroll, whose parents encouraged her to participate, admits to being "a little nervous about if' and, like the other students, "really excited."

The four mechanical engineering majors have been part of a yearlong, bioengineering project for NASA's Student Launch Project, titled "Activity of Drosophila (Fruit Flies) in a Microgravity Environment." That experiment is part of a larger project, in which they and other UVM students are designing and building the payload section for a NASA Nike-Orion sounding rocket, to be launched next summer from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. In that and the current endeavor, they are being guided by Mark Miller, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering, and Dr. Tony Keller, associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the Vermont Space Grant Consortium.

The two-week, March program will take place at Ellington Field, Texas, home of the Johnson Space Center's Reduced-Gravity Program. The students will undergo a one-week, pre-flight, physiological training that includes testing in a hyperbaric chamber. Then, donning their flight suits and boots, they'll board the KC-135A for a two-to-three-hour flight. They will fly 30 to 50 parabolic maneuvers, and the actual trajectory on each will provide approximately 25 seconds of zerogravity conditions. They also will experience 1.8-g entry and exit conditions in each reduced-g maneuver. (One "g" is one unit of gravity. At 1.8 g, you would feel 1.8 times heavier than you are. )

Although the experience will be heady, the return to terra firma will mean more work for the students analyzing the results of their experiment, writing reports and correcting the design before the next launch - that one for the fruit flies only.