Day 1: Orientation

On Wednesday, everyone from our team arrived in Houston, TX for our microgravity flight week. We spent most of that evening making a plan for the week and figuring out everything that still needed to get done. That night, we were all able to sleep for 10-12 hours which was a nice change of pace from our normal routine.

Thursday was the official start of our flight week. After arriving at Ellington Field, we were able to get badged and find our workstation for the week. A total of 14 teams are participating in our flight week, including an additional team from the U of A. We were briefed on major safety concerns and introduced to the individuals from the Reduced Gravity Office as well as the Aircraft Operations Division at Johnson Space Center. The group then split up. Most of our team started performing some final work on our structure while Kyle attended a more thorough orientation session.

At the orientation, Kyle learned many details. Fun facts: each minute our plane is in the air costs $638, bobby pins can kill us all, and the 9-g load requirement is for a crash scenario. We also learned that each of our flights will consist of 34 parabolas, with 28 zero-g, 3 lunar (1/6-g), and 3 martian (1/3-g). This flight profile consists of more lunar and martian parabolas than normal, but several projects requested them, so the modification was made with all teams' approval.

That evening, most of the teams had dinner at Gatti's Pizza - a very formal pizza parlor + arcade (think Chuck E. Cheese's). At the dinner, we were able to meet individuals from many of the other teams - we even found some SEDS Michigan members! It will be great to have the opportunity to learn more about everyone's experiment and network with the other teams here.

Tomorrow will be spent working more on our structure and attending the Physiological Training (a mandatory training for flight). Our weekend plans are still "to be determined," but we are hoping to explore Houston and the surrounding area. We are expecting a few articles about this experience to be written for the Arizona Daily Star and UANews, so make sure to watch those new outlets for those articles!

Posted by Kyle Stephens

Progress Update

Much activity has happened in the past two months, so I will try to give an overview on our progress. After finals ended in May, our team had about two weeks before we needed to submit our TEDP (Technical Experiment Data Package). This document basically describes our experiment and structure in detail, proving that it will be safe to fly and able to withstand the expected loads. Considering we did not have a structure at this point, we had a lot to do in those two weeks.

We decided to make our structure out of 1" Aluminum tubing. Since the material arrived in 10 ft increments, we needed to cut everything down to size ourselves.

After a few hours of work and several dozen cuts later, we finally had our pieces made and ready for assembly. After thinking about using various brackets to assemble the structure, we decided that the easiest assembly process was to have our structure welded. Luckily, we were able to find someone who was able to weld our structure together within a few days.

 Assembly of side panels, end panels, and the optical rail assembly was next. We decided to place rubber dampening mounts between our structure and the plane as well as our structure and the optical rail. We were concerned that the plane vibrations would disrupt the liquid lens performance, so we are hoping this measure is able to prevent that problem from occurring. Our near-complete structure and the optical rail setup is pictured below.

After a few days of work, we were pretty happy with our progress.  The TEDP was due on May 25th, so much of our work was spent writing the required information for that document.

We were not sure of the best way to verify the strength of our welds (a total of 24 joints). For the TEDP, our structure is required to withstand the follow load conditions: a 9-g load forward, a 6-g load down, a 3-g load backward, a 2-g load up, and a 2-g load on the side. We are able to prove the strength of our structure using a mathematical analysis or by performing actual load tests. Unfortunately, we were not able to complete load tests to make the May 25th deadline, so we opted to use Solidworks to model our structure and verify its performance that way. Although this method is able to theoretically prove the strength of our structure, we understood that further load tests would likely need to be performed to test our welds.

We submitted our TEDP on the May 25th deadline, with the expectation that a little more work was required. In mid-July, we were able to perform the load tests that were missing in our initial TEDP submission. Pictured below is our structure holding up against an equivalent 9-g load in the forward direction. The three red straps simulate the mounting configuration we will use in the plane.

 

Tests were performed in the other axes as well, and our structure held up well. These tests greatly simplified the analysis process for our TEDP and clearly prove that our structure is safe to fly.

During the 4th of July weekend, a few members of the team finished up the structure/ experiment assembly and organized all materials needed for the journey to Houston. Two members of our team, Nathan and Sara, are currently driving to Houston with our structure on-board. Kyle, Kevin, and Sean will each by flying to Houston from their respective locations tomorrow (Wednesday)

Our flight week begins on Thursday, July 7th. We expect to fly our experiment on July 12th and July 13th. Keep watching our website for updates during our time in Houston! We'll be there tomorrow!

Posted by Kyle Stephens