The campaign is split up into two groups and runs for two weeks between July the 12th through to the 28th. Micro-b has been selected to go in the first group that will be in Bordeaux and expimenting from the 12th to the 23rd of July. Also in group 1 is the team Lotus Shower, the other ISU team. We hope to have some fun with them in micro gravity
The test will be conducted by turning on the instruments with switches external to the sealed rack. Slides will be switched by pushing a button during an estimate of 4 gravity periods.
Tasks to be completed during flight phases Phase Tasks* Before the first parabola Instruments switched on 1.8g (up) Monitoring of the experiment Microgravity Monitoring of the experiment 1.8g (down) Monitoring of the experiment Flight period to the next pull up Record pH level of sample on notebook from meter display After the last parabola Instruments switched off
* All tasks will be performed by one of the two team members onboard - no assistance will be necessary and the experiment can be run by one person in the case that the other is not well, some tasks listed during flight period to next pull up may be eliminated by experimental design
Although the Micro-b team will not have to deal with such extremes, We think it is funny all the same.
"Now this message is for America's most famous athletes:
Someday you may be invited to fly in the back-seat of one of your country's
most powerful fighter jets. Many of you already have ... John Elway, John
Stockton, Tiger Woods to name a few. If you get this opportunity, let me
urge you, with the greatest sincerity...
Move to Guam.
Change your name.
Fake your own death!
Whatever you do .
Do Not Go!!!
I know. The U.S. Navy invited me to try it. I was thrilled. I was pumped.
I was toast! I should've known when they told me my pilot would be Chip
(Biff) King of Fighter Squadron 213 at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia
Beach.Whatever you're thinking a Top Gun named Chip (Biff) King looks like, triple
it. He's about six-foot, tan, ice-blue eyes, wavy surfer hair,
finger-crippling handshake -- the kind of man who wrestles dyspeptic
alligators in his leisure time. If you see this man, run the other way.
Fast.Biff King was born to fly. His father, Jack King, was for years the voice
of NASA missions. ("T-minus 15 seconds and counting ..."
Remember?) Chip would charge neighborhood kids a quarter each to hear his
dad. Jack would wake up from naps surrounded by nine-year-olds waiting for
him to say, "We have a liftoff."Biff was to fly me in an F-14D Tomcat, a ridiculously powerful $60 million
weapon with nearly as much thrust as weight, not unlike Colin Montgomerie. I
was worried about getting airsick, so the night before the flight I asked
Biff if there was something I should eat the next morning."Bananas," he said.
"For the potassium?" I asked.
"No," Biff said, "because they taste about the same coming up as they do
going down."The next morning, out on the tarmac, I had on my flight suit with my name
sewn over the left breast. (No call sign -- like Crash or Sticky or
Leadfoot ... but, still, very cool.) I carried my helmet in the crook of my
arm, as Biff had instructed. If ever in my life I had a chance to nail
Nicole Kidman, this was it.A fighter pilot named Psycho gave me a safety briefing and then fastened me
into my ejection seat, which, when employed, would "egress" me out of the
plane at such a velocity that I would be immediately knocked unconscious.Just as I was thinking about aborting the flight, the canopy closed over me,
and Biff gave the ground crew a thumbs-up. In minutes we were firing nose
up at 600 mph. We leveled out and then canopy-rolled over another F-14.*
Those 20 minutes were the rush of my life. Unfortunately, the ride lasted
80. It was like being on the roller coaster at Six Flags Over Hell. Only
without rails. We did barrel rolls, sap rolls, loops, yanks and banks. We
dived, rose and dived again, sometimes with a vertical velocity of 10,000
feet per minute. We chased another F-14, and it chased us.
We broke the speed of sound. Sea was sky and sky was sea. Flying at 200
feet we did 90-degree turns at 550 mph, creating a G force of 6.5, which is
to say I felt as if 6.5 times my body weight was smashing against me,
thereby approximating life as Mrs. Colin Montgomerie.
And I egressed the bananas. I egressed the pizza from the night
before.
And the lunch before that. I egressed a box of Milk Duds from the sixth
grade. I made Linda Blair look polite. Because of the G's, I was egressing
stuff that did not even want to be egressed. I went through not one airsick
bag, but two.Biff said I passed out. Twice. I was coated in sweat. At one point, as we
were coming in upside down in a banked curve on a mock bombing target and
the G's were flattening me like a tortilla and I was in and out of
consciousness, I realized I was the first person in history to throw down.I used to know cool. Cool was Elway throwing a touchdown pass, or Norman
making a five-iron bite. But now I really know cool. Cool is guys like
Biff, men with cast-iron stomachs and freon nerves. I wouldn't go up there
again for Derek Jeter's black book, but I'm glad Biff does every day, and
for less a year than a rookie reliever makes in a home stand.A week later, when the spins finally stopped, Biff called. He said he and
the fighters had the perfect call sign for me. Said he'd send it on a patch
for my flight suit.What is it? I asked.
"Two Bags."
First of all, let me just say that this was one of the highlights of my life so far. One of the most amazing things i have done. I am going to do anything I possible can to do it again. Look out Australia, if I have it my way, we will soon have one of these planes so we can do our own cool experiments.
Intro:
I have just returned from Bordeaux in France where ESA (the European Space Agency) runs their Parabolic flight campaign from. 4 to 5 times a year, ESA gets a modified Airbus A300 to fly in parabolas such that in between the up and the down of the trajectory the people inside areweightless for 22-25 seconds. Some really cool experiments can be done in this time, and my job was to be part of a team testing the reaction to weightlessness of a blue-green algea, that is very usefull in food production, air cleaning, water purification, oxygen creating, CO2 removing, and make-up !! All that is relevant to long term space exploration and habitation.The flight:
The cool thing about this campaign is that it does this porabola thing 31 times in a row, (and if I add the 5 porabolas we did two days before that to get used to it) giving me a total of somwhere between 13 and 15 minutes of weightlessness. This is the same amount of time as the original american Astronauts Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom experienced in the early 60's.The experience:
Woah.Each porabola goes like this. Starting at a speed that is 5 km/h under the absolute top speed that this plane will go, we then pull up at an angle of 47 degrees. (Just for reference, when a plane takes off, it climbs at about 18 degrees). Then it spends the next 22-25 seconds falling back towards the Earth, with everything inside it falling as well, then again it pulls out at an angle of -42 degrees (That's heading pretty much directly at the ground, very very quickly)
Pull up:
Surprisingly, you don't notice the incline cos the centrifugal and G forces (1.8 g's) stick you to the floor very well. 1.8g's doesn't sound like much, but it is, arms heads and cameras are all twice as heavy. Jumping in this hypergravity part of the flight is different. I think I cleared about 1 cm, jumping as high as i could. And it felt like when I jumped, I didn't fall back to the ground, but the ground came smashing back up into my feet. Sit ups were almost undoable, and push ups, forget it, I can normally do about 50 in a row, but I couldn't push out even 1 in hypergravity. Even walking was a challenge, I felt like was drunk, light headed from all the blood rushing from my head and having to really lift my really heavy legs.Injection...Microgravity:
From 1.8 G's to weightlessness almost instantly is an incredible feeling. Each time my heart went a little bit faster cos I couldn't actually beleive I was doing this. There was a rush of blood from my feet back to a more acceptable and normal place, and then the total and utter loss of all control! If you aren't holding onto something at this stage, Isaac Newton decides where you go, and no matter how much you try (try = flailing arms and legs wildly) you can't convince him that you really should be vertical, ready for the re-introduction of gravity forces. (explanation later). Luckily there are a lot of railing and straps to hold onto to have some limited control over where you want to float. It really is amazing to float like the Astronauts do. It feels like what it looks like in all thos astronaut movies and videos. Incredible. The attached pictures are just a few of the images of craziness that happens int his part. I managed to do some incredibley cool things like hang upside down, complete about 10 flips in a row, walk on the walls and roof (what a feeling, dancing on the ceiling), strike some superman, matrix and wicked kung fu/capoeira poses, and pretend I was an astronaut for half a day !! I really can't explain it, I hope this attempt, with the pictures in the phto gallery is enough!Pull out:
This is where the gravity is re-ntroduced, the plane has to recover from facing down at 42 degrees, to horizontal again, and just like the pull up, we get to experience 1.8 g's again. This you could probably imagine, is amusing at times. From weightless to twice the gravity again, almost instantly. If you were trusting Mr Newton at this stage, the fall back to the ground would be twice as severe than normal circumstances. For me it would be like I was 170kg's falling 4 meters at 20 meters per second...Thwack. With no control this would really hurt, and during the flight I could here some loud dull thuds that resembled the thwack I just described, followed by of course the groan of the person who just landed! This is all different if there is some control involved. I found myself a number of times trying to be as far away from the ground as possible in readiness for the landing (That is stable, with feet towards the ground) when we were told that the porabola is about to end. The ground looked very close, but felt far away. It was really cool. This is where i found out that walking was tough, cos I normally had to try and walk back to where my experiment was, from where I had landed.Prepare for the next porabola:
After all of that, gravity went back to normal, we all cheered and smiled cos each porabola was just as incredible as the last, high fives and slaps on the back all over the place. I then had to push a button on the experiment (save data) and then a minute later, we were doing it all again. AwesomeI am going to do anything I possibly can to try and do this again, cos it was that incredible. Me and the experiment team are going to try and do the microgravity tour of the world, we have contacts in America and Russia to get on their planes. The experience was more than I could have ever imagined. It was an experience not to be forgotten.
I hope you enjoyed reading all this. You will hear more, I'm sure
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