The First Press Release

Here's a copy of the first press release on our experiment.  It was written by PPPL's Patti Wieser and the photo is our group from the first day flight.  You can't quite tell, but we're all floating and holding onto our rig which is bolted to the floor.

Plasma, and Convection, and Microgravity! Oh, My!

PPPL Science Education Team Takes Experiment Aboard NASA's Weightless Wonder 

 

Surrounding the box (with a PPPL sticker) containing the plasma ball and lava lamp are, from left, Princeton High School teacher Tim Anderson, PPPL's James Morgan, Notre Dame High School teacher Hope Brennan, PPPL's Andrew Zwicker, and Toms River High School teacher Ken Hartzfeld. (Photo courtesy of NASA)

By Patti Wieser

Using a plasma ball and a glitter lamp, a team from the DOE Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) studied convective flow in microgravity aboard NASA's Weightless Wonder in Houston August 3 and 4.

"We collected data by filming a plasma ball and a 'glitter lamp' as the airplane performed a series of 68 parabolas over two days and the gravitational force varied between 0 and 1.8 g," says PPPL Science Education Program Head Andrew Zwicker.

It was the Lab's third year to participate in experiments on zero-gravity flights and Zwicker's second year aboard one of the 90-minute journeys. "We looked at how changes in gravity affect the rise of the plasma filaments," he says. "Then, just for something extra, we decided to add a glitter lamp, which also shows how shiny pieces of glitter rise when a light bulb at the bottom of the lamp heats the fluid within."

Plasma, the fourth state of matter, is a hot, electrically charged gas. The team recorded the plasma filaments' rate of rise under microgravity, and compared it to the rate under normal and hypergravity.

In a plasma ball, filaments of plasma form when a central electrode ionizes gas atoms inside the sphere. The plasma filaments heat the background gas, causing it to rise convectively. This creates an area of smaller gas density. The next plasma filament forms slightly higher than the one it replaced since it is easier to form the filament in that location. The net result is that the plasma filaments in the plasma ball rise to the top. However, in zero gravity, the plasma filaments freeze.

"We used standard video equipment and visual analysis software for the experiment. The team is analyzing the video and writing new curricula for their classes so that their students can use this data," notes PPPL Senior Program Leader James Morgan, who participated.

The team spent several days in Houston, training and preparing for the flight before taking their science experiment aboard. Participating teachers are from the DOE Academies Creating Teacher Scientists (ACTS) program at PPPL, a seven-week mentored research experience for high school and middle school teachers (see list below).

"It went beyond awesome," Zwicker says of the experience. "It was a fusion of education and science."

The ACTS teachers who participated in experiments aboard the Weightless Wonder are: 

Tim Anderson, Princeton High School, Princeton, NJ
Hope Brennan, Notre Dame High School, Lawrenceville, NJ
Pamella Ferris, Riverside Middle School, Evans, GA
Ken Hartzfeld, Toms River High School, Toms River, NJ
Paul Sedita, Canandaigua Academy, Canandaigua, NY
Lisa Tarman, William Penn High School, York, PA

PPPL Science Education participants:
James Morgan
Andrew Zwicker

***END***

Photos!

NASA was fast in uploading the photos.  Here's a link to all of them:

Click here:

Our entire group, PPPL on the left, St. Peter's College on
the right.

And a few favorites...

Just floating

First parabola!

Push-ups in a lunar gravity

Another Day, Another Flight

There's not enough room on the plane for an entire team at once so Day 2 is another 34 parabolas with Pam, Lisa, and Paul aboard. The routine is the same but the roles are now reversed. At 8:00 am Tim, Ken, Hope, James, and myself went aboard to prepare the experiment and make some changes. We modified the plasma ball so that it no longer had a ground connection and we added a filter to block some of the light on the glitter lamp that was saturating our camera at high power. Everything looked good and it felt great to be on the plane again, even if we weren't flying.

By the time we finished, the others had taken their meds and were going through last minute preparation. We hung out to take photos as they marched onto the plane and then waited as the plane took off into the sky. The rest of the ground crew then rushed off to catch a tour of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (the world's largest indoor pool) but I hung out at the airfield since I saw it last year.

Before you know it, the others are back from the tour and the plane is on the ground. Pam, Lisa, and Paul walk off the plane with huge smiles, they all felt great! After the plane is checked out it gets unloaded and we're back on the plane to help remove our rig safely. Back on the ground everything looks good but something happened to the computer in flight and it stopped recording about 1/4 of the way into the flight and the files that are there won't open. When we get back to Princeton, I'll see if there is a way to save them but it is a stark reminder of how difficult it is to perform an experiment in that environment. Even if the data is lost, we have excellent data from the first day to look at when we return.

On the way to lunch I literally ran into a group from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) including the past and current presidents of the organization. They sponsored the overall week and were there to fly and to evaluate it. We talked for about 15 minutes about collaborating on science education, exchanged business cards, etc. but had to cut it short because we were all melting in the more than 100 F heat. After lunch and some rest, James and I met with Doug, the head of the microgravity program to talk about how we can continue and expand the collaboration between the Department of Energy, PPPL, and NASA. That was an excellent conversation (why do the most productive meetings seem to always happen with a beer in hand???) and we have a plan on how to move forward. If it all works out, we'll be back next year.

Can't wait!

Up, Up, Up, in the Air

Another successful flight in microgravity, another try to explain how it feels to float in the air. Uhhhh, hmmmm, welll, ok, you just can't describe it beyond "awesome!"

The routine was the same as last year. Arrival at 7:30 am, pre-flight briefing at 8:00 am. Meds at 8:30 am, board the plane at 9:00 am, take-off at 9:30 am, return at 11:00 am. We have two teams sponsored by the DOE and the two experimental rigs are bolted down next to each other in the plane. The team from Jersey City only had two people flying (one was not medically cleared), so our alternate flyer, Ken, flew along with James, Tim, Hope, and myself. During our pre-flight briefing, Lisa, Pam, and Paul boarded the plane to check that our equipment was set up and ready to go.

During the briefing, the NASA official took us through the details of the flight -- 30 parabolas of zero-G, each lasting approximately 25 seconds followed by approximately the same amount of time at the bottom of the parabola at 1.8 g. We are     going to do 18 of these in a row before leveling the plane out to turn around and then another 12. This will be followed by 2 parabolas at a lunar gravity (1/6 that of Earth) and then 2 final parabolas at  Martian gravity (0.4 g).

That was followed by a member of the airplane's crew taking us through the safety concerns during take-off and landing (wear your seatbelt, oxygen below the seat) before the flight physician explained the details of the medicines we were about to take. (I took the highest dosage but if I fly again, I think I will drop it down a bit since my head was definitely fuzzy before and for a long time after the flight.)

We swallowed the pills, met with the entire team to go over the experiment, lined up in single file for the march onto runway and boarded the plane. I wasn't really nervous this time, just thrilled to be there. When we got to 5,000 feet they released us from our seats (don't forget to re-buckle your seat belts so they don't fly around during parabolas) and we walked to the front of the plane to our experiment while the plane is still rapidly climbing.

It took about 15 minutes to get to our flight zone and then the 1 minute call went out. We gave each other the thumbs up and then either lay down flat on our backs or sat with our backs against the padded wall waiting for the plane to pull the nose up sharply into our first parabola. As it does, you feel this weight on your body everywhere and you are driven into the padded floor of the plane. After 20 seconds or so that weight eases and then it happens....you just float off the floor into the air! It is simply incredible to be on the ceiling of the plane, relaxed, at ease, looking down at our experiment while everywhere I looked are people just floating through the air with the biggest smiles and looks of amazement that matches my own.

We will get the video in a few weeks and I'll post it here, it does a much better job of describing the looks on our faces. Our experiment worked well, the plasma ball filaments freeze in zero-G, James and Hope felt great the entire time, Tim was just a bit sick near the end, Ken got sick around the 5th parabola, and I had just a touch of nausea but ignored it and tried to savor each and every parabola. If I had to guess, my slight nausea was due to taking photos and video with our small personal cameras and looking through the little screen. Once I stopped doing that, I felt fine.

After the flight, we took a group photo, had a post-flight briefing, gave back our flight suits, and went to get something to eat since we were all starving. From there it was another behind-the-scenes tour at the Johnson Space Flight Center where the highlight included the kitchen where they develop new foods for the astronauts.

What an incredible day!

Year 2, Day 1 - Back in Houston

It's a little more than a year later and I'm back in Houston for another series of experiments in microgravity. No more dusty plasmas, this time we're looking at convection in a varying gravitational field.  Instead of undergraduate students, I'm here with a group of teachers from around the country.  Here's some background about how we got here.

Last year, in between the training and flight, I talked to the NASA education folks about the possibility of doing something similar with teachers.  This is something NASA already does, teachers design a microgravity experiment with their students and then bring it back to the classroom.  PPPL has a variety of programs for teachers, including a summer research internship.  Combining the two seemed like a natural fit, the only question was how.  Fast forward from last summer to this spring and NASA contacts me to let me know that they have openings for two teams of six flyers in their teacher program. It doesn't leave us much time but that's an opportunity that is too good to pass up.  So I contact a colleague of mine that has a grant to fund research with teachers from Jersey City (that's one team), and I put together a second team with teachers already in our research program and we're off.

The problem with the PPPL team is that they don't get to PPPL until the first week of July, leaving us just four weeks to design and build our experiment.  With such little time, I decide that it is prudent to use the same setup that the undergraduate team used.  It's already approved by the NASA safety group and all we have to do is remove the dusty plasma portion of the rig and replace it with something else.  That something else turned out to be a plasma ball.  We use them all the time in our workshops to teach about plasma, and the plasma streamers rise due, in part, to the fact that they heat the gas in the ball which then rises.  So the question becomes how would changes in gravity effect the rise of the plasma streamers?  Then, just to add something extra to the experiment, we decided to add a Glitter Lamp, which also shows how shiny pieces of glitter rise as a light bulb at the bottom of the lamp heats the fluid within.  The final piece of our experiment was to add a way that to control the brightness of the glitter lamp and the plasma ball.  With that in place, things were still a scramble but we got everything together and shipped it out here in time.

The team flew out on Thursday but since I was already trained, I came out here yesterday.  Of course I needed to rent something fun for the drive from the airport and to the airfield.  By the time I got here, the team had already eaten so and wanted to go to a karaoke bar.  I stopped off at an Indian restaurant next door to the bar and had one of the best meals I've had in a while.  Then it was buckets of Coors Lite and Dixie Chicken (Little Feat) (video of me singing), Satisfaction (Stones), Friends in Low Places (Garth Brooks), and Live Like You're Dying (Tim McGraw).  Have to say that while it's painfully clear that I can't sing a lick, it was a lot of fun.

Today we made the final preparations and then had the safety walkthrough which we passed with flying colors.  Loading the plane took a while but also was straight-forward.  Then we had a chance to ask a teacher-astronaut questions (What does the Earth look like when it rises? (beautiful)  What does space smell like? (metallic) , Etc.)  It was inspiring to hear him speak, as it is whenever you hear about someone's experiences in space.

After that it was time for our motion sickness video and Q&A.  One person asked about going to the bathroom on the plane (don't, but if you have to, there's a bag and a bucket).  Of course that led to Hope emphatically stating that there would be no sh&^**ing on our flight which seems like a reasonable request.  Then it was time to hand out the flight suits.  Hope, James, Tim, Ken, and I will fly tomorrow, Lisa, Pam, and Paul on Wednesday. I'm a little bit nervous, but nothing like last year.  I felt great before, I should feel even better this time. The team is psyched, ready to fly, do some science, and have some fun.  Tomorrow we get there at 7:30 am, take our meds around 8:30 am, and fly at 9:30 am.  I can't wait.