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

Liquid Lens Progress Update

The University of Arizona chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (UASEDS) formed a team of five individuals to submit a proposal for the Space Grant sponsored “Grant Us Space” program. This program is within NASA's Reduced Gravity program. Our proposal focused on testing a liquid lens in a microgravity environment. Liquid lenses can be used for a variety of purposes in areas where fast lens actuation is necessary, or where a less mechanical-intensive structure is desired. In mid-March, our proposal was selected, and we have been working steadily ever since.

During the month of April, our team focused on finalizing a design and determining the proper structure to hold our experiment. After speaking with Dr. Su Xu from the University of Central Florida (an individual who has published many papers on the subject), it was determined that the best liquid lens design for our purposes involved a two-fluid chamber with ferrofluid actuation. Dr. Xu published a paper with a similar design. In this design, the liquid lens aperture is 4 mm to avoid dealing with the effect of gravity. Since gravity is our primary concern, we decided to scale up this lens structure to a 15-25 mm aperture.

Just this past week, Kevin, Nathan, and Kyle spent some time in the machine shop constructing a liquid lens structure (picture below). The structure, when completed, will hold two fluids in the center where the differing diameters represent the area were the two fluids will go. The diagonal chamber will hold the ferrofluid and provide the actuation, changing the pressure in one chamber, creating a “lens” at the fluid-fluid interface.

 

This structure allows for an aperture as large as 19 mm. With the generous material donation from Dr. Xu from UCF, we should have all the materials we need to finish this lens structure and test its performance by early next week.

We are getting into finals week here at the University of Arizona, but progress will continue on validating the liquid lens structure and ensuring the SCOTS test will work as expected. The experiment’s structure and electronics are also another top priority. More information on these components will follow.

Posted by Kyle Stephens

Outreach Event - Liberty High School

For our first outreach event, the UASEDS Microgravity team visited Liberty High School in Peoria, Arizona on April 21, 2011. The plan was to visit a science classroom, give a presentation, and facilitate a few activities for three classes of about 25 students each.

The presentation given was entitled "Why Space?" By focusing on past, present, and future NASA exploration, the presentation makes claims for why people should care about space and how NASA benefits our everyday lives. We also discussed our microgravity project to show the students the kinds of opportunities available to them in college. 

Our first activity focused on stressing the importance of communication within teams. We had the students pair up. One student was given a space-related item written down on a card. That student was required to have their teammate draw that item only using directional instructions and shapes (left/ right, top/ bottom, circle, square, etc). Most of the students were able to complete the activity rather successfully, but some cases demonstrated some miscommunications. We discussed the outcomes with each class and emphasized the importance of clear and concise communication when working in groups.

Our  second activity was called "Engineering Management." This activity involved giving groups of 5-7 students a bag of materials like wood shims, metal brackets, nuts & bolts, pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks, and clothespins. Using these materials, the students were instructed to begin by making a structure capable of supporting a three pound weight about the size of a fist. Throughout the activity, certain engineering-related events occured: the power went out (shutting off the class room lights), certain team members fell ill (individual not able to help the team for five minutes), product recalls occurred (students had to give up certain items), and communications systems broke down (students had to work in silence). As a final twist, with ten minutes remaining, the students were told that their "bosses" changed their mind - instead of building a structure to support a weight, they wanted the tallest tower to be built.

This activity teaches students what it is like to work in an engineering environment, such as NASA, although maybe on an extreme scale. Students learned the importance of being flexible and understanding that things may not always go as planned. All the students we worked with appeared to enjoy the activity and took it seriously. 

Through this outreach event, we were able to reach out to about 80 students and teach them the importance of space exploration and the engineering behind it all. We plan to participate in more activities such as this one in the future.

 You can view our "Why Space?" presentation below: