The UASEDS Microgravity team will be participating in NASA's Reduced Gravity program during the "Grant Us Space" flight week (July 7-16, 2011). Their project is entitled ANalysis of the Gravitational Effects of Liquid lenses (ANGEL).
Many different types of liquid lenses have been construed and tested, but the Earth's gravity causes surface deformation, leading to poor image quality. Typically, these liquid lenses have an aperture on the order of a few millimeters to lessen the effect of gravity. The UASEDS Microgravity team will be constructing a liquid lens one order of magnitude larger than previous attempts to test in microgravity and hypergravity environments. It is expected that the microgravity environment will lead to an increase in imaging quality through a liquid lens system.
