A team of UH-Clear Lake and San Jacinto College students are working with NASA’s Microgravity University program to research how to suppress fires in microgravity. While it is not absolute zero gravity, NASA’s 747 Carrier is the closest a person can get to weightlessness on Earth. | Courtesy of NASA
NASA’s Weightless Wonder aircrafts, which follow an elliptic path relative to the center of the Earth, are some of the closest approximations of zero gravity on the planet. They have been used for research, training and movie sets since 1959. A small team of students from San Jacinto College and UH-Clear Lake will get to experience one of these flights in order to conduct research on how to suppress fires in microgravity.
Students from universities and colleges nationwide submitted their proposals on why they should be chosen for NASA’s Microgravity University program, but only 14 were selected. The team consists of three SJC students, four UHCL students and a faculty advisor representing each school.
“You can’t really have a low gravity environment on Earth, so the teams stimulate a low gravity environment by flying a 747 carrier. They then climb in the air and combine the decent of the air and the gravity, making the people feel as they have more gravitational pull than usual,” said Kwok-Bon Yue, UHCL’s faculty adviser and professor of computer science.
“(When the plane) reaches a very high altitude some of the decent field will cancel the gravitational pull, so for a very brief moment, only about ten seconds, the people inside the aircraft will experience low gravity, and they call that the microgravity environment.”
This is not the first trip for some students. Two UHCL students, Ryan Page and Jarrett Lockridge, participated in last year’s flight when they attended SJC.
“Being able to participate in a microgravity flight last April was an amazing experience, and I’m hoping that this will be even better. On your first flight, there are always so many unexpected things that can distract you from the experiment. I remember the dry mouth from the motion sickness medication being so bad that I couldn’t really talk towards the end of the flight,” said Page, a computer engineering senior, in a press release.
“But, the prior flight experience should come in handy and allow us to design and conduct a better experiment.”
The team’s experiment, called the Acoustic Flame Suppression Mechanics, will test the use of sound waves to alter the physics of flames and suppress them without using water or fire extinguishers. This knowledge can prove the difference between life and death when flames break out in the closed sections of space shuttles or stations.
“Getting a chance to be on a 747, to have the microgravity experiences, it’s very exciting,” Yue said.
“(The students) work with professionals and get a sense of what the real world looks like in a cutting-edge science and engineering institute.”
The project is part of the Microgravity University Minority Serving Institutions and Community Colleges program, which rewards minority serving institutions with the opportunity to research in low gravity environments. The flight is expected to take place in early November.
