Adventures in microgravity: Students experiment in simulated space-flight conditions

ASU Dust Devil research team members (left to right) Pye Pye Zaw, Emily McBryan and Dani Hoots hold on during a flight of a modified jet that simulates space flight by creating low-gravity conditions. The team participated in a NASA flight program that provided students opportunities to perform scientific experiments requiring microgravity conditions. Photo by: Courtesy of NASA

Six Arizona State University students spent a week in June conducting airborne research in low gravity under the guidance of scientists and engineers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Theyre members of the ASU Dust Devils, one of 14 teams of students from universities throughout the United States selected from among more than 60 teams that applied to do experiments as part of NASAs Reduced Gravity Educational Flight Program.

Each of the teams projects required performing experiments in low gravity or microgravity conditions. The work was done during flights in a modified Boeing 727-200 jet used to train astronauts that is capable of creating microgravity conditions. The aircraft is sometimes called the Weightless Wonder.

Microgravity is the extremely weak gravitational force that is experienced, for example, by people in a spacecraft orbiting the Earth, enabling them to become virtually weightless and to float inside a spacecraft.

Students from the University of Southern California, Yale University, Purdue University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Polytechnic University and the University of Washington were on some of the other teams conducting the microgravity research.

From dust to solar systems

In flights over the Gulf of Mexico, the Dust Devils were looking at dust electrification and coagulation how dust particles clump together and bond in low-gravity environments.

Understanding the ways in which dust particles stick together could be important in revealing the fundamental process that allows solar systems and planets to form, says Dust Devils member Amy Kaczmarowski, who graduated in the spring with a degree in aerospace engineering from ASUs Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

The team varied the size and composition of dust particles placed inside 12 vacuum chambers containing different combinations of particles of three materials silica, aluminum and a material believed to be similar to dust on the surface of Mars.