Flight Day 1

NOTE: if you have not read my last post A few more hurdles... then stop. You should read that one before reading this one. Just scroll down and you should find it!

Today was our first flight day!!!

We arrived early in the morning to the hangar with Tanya in her flight suit ready to go. Hannah and I went to the mandatory meeting and learned that we would be allowed to go in the plane to set up all the cabinet items while Tanya and Tamra went through the meds and pre-flight briefing.

Cabinet items are anything we are taking on the plane that is not totally secured on our apparatus. Anything that we have to velcro down during flight is considered a cabinet item, along with our camera. So we packed our computer, electronics box, watch glasses, camera, clamp, and fireblanket in the bright yellow box that was called the cabinet.

Here is a shot of the camera with all the experiments in their boxes:

We are at the very front, looking towards the tail. There are seats for all the flyers to sit in during take off and landing.

And here is our microwave, ready to go:

After stowing everything, all we could do was watch and wait, encourage our team members and remind them of last minute details. At last, we stepped back and let them file on to the cabin through the back end of the plane. (Also, I thought I caught a sweet recording of them all walking on, but only afterwards I realized that I hadn't hit the record button!!!!)

This is a shot of Tamra and Tanya, with the plane in the background:

And of the whole group of olive-clad flyers:

Also, the plane doesn't actually have that dorsal-fin like protrustion above the 'Z', it is the tail of a plane behind it, one that is called the Guppie. It is used for transporting large items because the whole front of the plane opens to allow cargo to be loaded. They have transported some of the shuttle sections across the globe in this beast. They were doing touch-and-go maneuvers yesterday and it was really cool to see it fly in the air. It is so huge it does not look like it should be able to fly and it looks to go really slow....

Once we watched them take off, all we had to do was sit and wait for an hour and a half. I worked on the presentation I have to give on Saturday when I get back from TX about my research at NASA last summer.

They landed right on time and directly went off to take a group shot in front of the plane and go to a post-flight debriefing. It was only after that meeting, over lunch, that we were able to talk with Tanya and Tamra to see how the morning went.

It went well...and not so well. We did get 5 full runs in, and some right in the microgravity window, but the inside of the microwave apparently started sparking during the zero-g sections. Also, they experienced some noxious fumes, especially during the last run. So, they decided to stop after the fifth run, which was okay because they had used 2/3 of their parabolas. When they got to the ground, we started investigating what was causing the sparking and fuming.

When we got it open on the ground, we discovered that the large Silicon Carbide susceptor was floating enough that it hit the sides of the metal cage it was sitting in. It couldn't move much, but it was enough that the slight graze would cause some sparking. Basically, our susceptor is similar to flint and, well, you know what happens with flint and steel are struck together...

We also discovered that there was a metal plate that came in the microwave, situated on the right hand side, that apparently heats up significantly. We had surrounded the ends of the metal cage spokes (see picture below) with layers of polyester foam batting that was flame and heat resistant, but we discovered that the heat was significant enough that it heated up the metal spoke inside the foam and subsequently melted the foam from the inside. It smelled pretty terrible, so that is where we thing the fumes were coming from. We did have a significant amount of duct tape in the microwave as well, so the adhesive smell might have contributed, but the tape did not really melt or get too hot.

Melted foam:

We are going to attach a vent out to the microwave's back vent to see if we can minimize any smell, though I think we won't have any with the changes we made to the set-up. The picture below is of our new covering - basically we covered every metal part, except for where the watch glasses go, with thermal heat shielding. We even stitched everything together with Nomex thread, which is the material firefighter's suits are made from. I think, actually, that our flight suits are also made of Nomex.

New 'cozy' for our steel frame:

We added a pressure-inducing bar to the top so that we don't have to tape any of the legs down during flight and we took the clip off the watch glass part because the thermal shielding does a sufficient job in keeping the watch glass from moving in micro-g.

So, I guess we can just pray that tomorrow I will be able to function well through both zero- and hyper-g and that we can gather lots of data! And that nothing goes wrong!!!!