AsCans and Tours!

Thursday, the 29th of April was a day packed full of tours of JSC and the NBL, where we got to see many things that the usual public does not get to see!

The day began with a tour of the facility where all the ISS mockups are stored. There were full scale models of each one, as well as a model of the Orion capsule. The Orion is currently has an unknown future, but the engineers are continuing to perfect the structure.

Here is an image of some of the modules:

In this building there were also about 2.5 full-scale shuttle mockups: two stand-alone noses with the personal cabins, one with the cockpit and the cargo bay, and one of just the cargo bay. The one with just the cargo bay also had a model of the robotic arm that takes every item out of the shuttle, so that they could practice the manuevers to get everything out.

This is the largest model, with the cockpit and cargo bay. The tail has been cut off and the wings removed, as they are not necessary and would not fit in the building:

Also, we got to sit in one of the crew member chairs: (the orange part is a parachute that is strapped to the crew member)

We were supposed to the training area for thermal tile repairs, which is basically a couple of tables and a projector that projected on to the side of the shuttle mock up, but there were astronauts in training, so we had to skip it and were not allowed to take pictures of them.

Then we got to see a Soyez shuttle close up, at least the crew parts of it, and it is really small!

Three people get to sit in those buckets for 2+ days, curled up in the fetal posistion, while the rocket catches up with the ISS. The shuttle carries up to 7 people, a bit more comfortably.... The capsule you see in the picture is actually one that went to space on Exploration 1. Very cool to see!

After finishing in the mock-up training facility, we were shuttled over to a conference room where we learned about the space suits. Did you know that they have about three different models to work with?

Here is an image of all the layers that go into a suit, the yellow one is a rubber bladder layer that allows the suit to be pressurized:

Suit testing occurs all the time, they even use some 'hollywood' suits that are not functional, but are used to test the suit-vehicle interfaces when designing the Lunar Electric Vehicle (which is being renamed since Obama says we are not going back to the moon...) Also, they even test new suit designs on the microgravity plane!

Next, Hannah and I traveled over to the NBL, where we had done our chamber training, to get a tour. We missed our tour last Friday because we needed to prep for the surprise ground test on Monday. Javier, one of the flight docs, gave us a great tour. We learned all about the history of the facility, were there are similar pools in the world and even got to see the Orien capsule that they were building for the pool.

The pool itself is 40ft deep, which is why it is so blue. It is extremely clean water because all 6.5 million gallons are filtered every 20 hours. For each astronaut in the pool there are at least 4 divers and one has a camera on the astronaut's face at all times. While we were there, there were two astronauts just getting out of the pool and since Javier knew them, he asked them to take a picture with us!

They are wearing basically their underwear, which is their main cooling system while in the space suit. The long underwear has rubber tubes woven through it and water runs through the tubes to cool them down. The one on the right in the picture is Steve Swanson, and he has been to space a few times. Here is his bio. The one on the left is a newly selected Astronaut Cannidate, or AsCan, and is just beginning his training.

After the NBL tour, we traveled back over to JSC proper and went to see Mission Control! We sat in the viewing area and learned about what each person does while watching them run a shuttle landing simulation.

Then we walked over to the Apollo Mission Control Center, where we got to go inside the room and actually sit at the consoles! It was very neat to touch and experiance a part of the history of the space program.

Here I am at a console:

And the room:

That room concluded our tours for the day, which was fine because I was exhausted, and we traveled back to the home we were staying at. Friday consisted of just giving a video presentation of our project, so I don't have much more to say about our experiance. But, you should check back soon for a video of our trip and project, as well as a link to a photo album of all our photos!

Up, Up and Away! And down and up, and down and up...

Today was the day I went up in the plane, and yes, I did get sick - let's just get this out of the way in the beginning.

Early in the morning we got up and got ready go, eating a light toast breakfast and got on our way to Ellington field. Not to blame my sickness on something other than the flight, but already that morning I was not feeling well from dinner the night before. We had made vegetarian chili with soy in it, and it was a bit too spicy for me. I ate it, but regretted it the next morning when I got up. I was, however, feeling much better by the time we went to the pre-flight briefing. We got information about how the flight would go - take-off, 10 minutes to set up, 32 parabolas, then some time to break down and then back to our seats for landing. Easy, right?

We took our meds - a NASA developed combo of Scopolamine and Dextramine - and then got lined up to go on the plane!

Here is a picture of Hannah and I ready to go:

When we got on the plane, take-off and set-up went as planned, expect we forgot to turn on our power strip until the second parabola! I noticed that the microwave had no light, so I asked Hannah to look at the power.

Each time we went into microgravity, it was really strange. Because I was strapped down at the waist, I didn't float all over the cabin, so I didn't get the full weightless experiance. I had to still be able to function and "do science" during those times, so I was switching out watchglasses during the microgravity and not be flying around in the cabin. Hannah flew around a bit and hopefully we got some great pictures!

About parabola #12, I couldn't take it anymore. The transition from the hypergravity (2G), where you feel twice your normal weight, to zerogravity was very rough. I went from flat on the ground to sitting straight up in less than a second. While this would not be a problem on the ground, it really gave me a headache. My head was in a lot of pain. Also, it kind of feels like your whole insides are coming up and trying to get out of you. Regardless, I couldn't continue after a while, so the leveled off and got me back to a seat where I could strap in and not float up as much. The transitions were still rough and I was just watching that parabola count up to #32, when I knew that we would level off and land.

Hannah stepped up when I got sick and threw on the thermal gloves and took over the whole experiment. She had a few crew members step in to give some help when she needed to be held down during microgravity. She was able to get 4 runs in and bring our total to 6 runs, though one of our first two hit a part of the flight where we leveled off and only saw 1G, so it won't be super helpful.

On the bright side, there were very minimal fumes and no sparking!

I, in the back, went from being very hot to very chilled. Basically whenever we hit microgravity, I let my knees float up as much as they wanted to, and virtually curled into the fetal position in the air and tried not to move at all in any direction. The transition were still tough, but less so because I didn't have to move my head as far. The doctor and all the flight crew were very helpful and soothing through the whole ordeal.

Still, we all smiled when we got off the plane, so any footage you might see will hopefully have me smiling!

After our experiment was off-loaded, we were able to pull everything apart and get it ready to be shipped off. We ran to FedEx (where customer service was not great) and then found a small souvenir shop to try to find Reduced Gravity patches. We found the store, but not the patches, so we will look around tomorrow when we tour JSC.

All in all, a fun day that I will never forget!! Watch this blog for pictures from our tours tomorrow and then watch for our outreach video of the whole process.

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!!!!

A few more hurdles...

Monday was a day we were dreading - we had to go through a Test Readiness Review (TRR). We had been told that this was the day they were going to 'grill' us on our Testing and Experimental Data Plan (TEDP) that we had put together in Feburary/March. We had continued to work on this document with the help of our mentor (see below) until basically the day before we flew. This was the document that included the structural analysis that we just couldn't seem to get right.

So, Monday morning we show up bright and extra early because not only do we have a mandatory meeting, but we also have that surprise full ground test that we were notified of on Friday afternoon. I ran to the meeting and left Tanya and Hannah to explain the project, and when I got back we were just finishing up and getting some suggestions from the people looking at our set-up. (Which, by the way, is 'set-up' one or two words or is it hyphenated? I have no idea!) We made the needed changes and then just sat and chatted for the next while before our TRR. Because of the ground test, we were ready way before we needed to be for the review.

The TRR committee was composed of about 20+ people from all areas of expertise. We just had to introduce ourselves, go through our experiment, and highlight all the safety precautions we had taken. When the time came, virtually no one had questions and there was nothing they asked us to change. One gentleman was very interested in our hypothesis and the science, less concerned about the safety side of things.

So, after the moved along to the next group, we thought we were home free. Until we weighed our project with everything finally attached. It was 40lbs too heavy. 'Non-trivial' as one of the engineers who had been working with us said. Apparently, we underestimated the weight of the frame by about 20lbs. This caused stress because our structural test did not test for the full weight of the apparatus. So, we frantically tried to get the weight down by pulling off everything we could and began combing through our structural analysis to see if we could find an equation to plug the new weight into and then see if we could still be fine. Well, first off, we couldn't find the right equation, but our engineer took some measurements and worked out a diagram on paper to see if the test we had done last thursday would cover the new weight. And miraculously, it did - by less than 60 pounds of force. The tested amount of stress was good up to 2075 pounds of force (or something...not really sure) and our equation for our structure came out to 2017 pounds. We barely scraped by.

After finally getting through that hurdle, we reassembled the parts that we had removed and then took it to be installed in the plane. But, once again, things did not go easily. Apparently, the bolt holes on the floor are not perfectly spaced, so we almost only got 2 of the 4 bolts in. This caused more math headaches, as we had only tested for 3 bolts, which meant that the engineer was going to do more math to see if our structure would pass muster. But, we jimmied the metal frame over just a few more holes and finally got a third bolt in!

And after that, we thought we might be good to finally go, but yet again, we had one more hurdle. They thought that the microwaves would interfere with the pilot's/plane's instruments and communication, especially since we were the closest group to the cockpit. So, some more NASA guys got out a bunch of equipment and ran a test while the microwave was microwaving. The microwave was apparently well-shielded and caused no noise or blips on their measurer.

Finally we were all ready to go and got to go get fitted for our flight suits! I must admit that in this whole project, I have most looked forward to getting and wearing my flight suit...they just look so cool! I was issued one long olive green suit and given a name tag. I get to keep the name tag, but not the suit :(

Here is a picture of our whole team in our suits in front of our work table and sign:

Pretty sweet, yes?

Now I'd like to add a word about our mentor, Tamra George (who goes mainly by George):

She is a very short woman, but she holds her own. She has a degree in Welding Engineering from Ohio State and plays indoor and outdoor soccer. At JSC, she is one of three engineers who work on designing and building tools for the astronauts to use in space. How cool is that! Apparently it takes about 6 months from initial conception to flight date to develop a new tool and train the astronauts to use it. There are stress and materials people who also work with the developers along the way. Apparently, one tool that they wanted to send up with the latest shuttle was to be used during one hour of a spacewalk but was pulled two days before launch because of some retro-fitting concern. During spacewalks, the three engineers cycle through watching the astronauts use the tools. There is always one person watching. Apparently, you can only use tools for the purposes they were intended for in space, so you couldn't use a screwdriver for a lever, etc. There is also a whole group dedicated to watching the spacesuits, as they might get small rips or tears as they work and any tear could potentially depressurize the suit. Glove checks are among the most common procedures during a spacewalk.

Anyways, she has a cool job, but volunteers her time to mentor. She works with us for 4+ days and it is all her vacation time! During and after her time with us, she continues to work on her real projects.

She is going to fly with Tanya on Tuesday because we are one person short. Here is a picture of her that I found on a volunteer website for a Darfur benefit basketball tournament (I think):

P.S. If you want to fly on the plane commercially, it'll cost you about $10,000. We fly on the Zero-G plane, and if you go on their website they sell a 12-15 parabola package for a hair over $5,000 and we experiance about 30+ parabolas. But, you get to keep your Zero-g flight suit, whereas I do not. I might a suit for outreach, however...

NASA Disney

Over the weekend, we are were not allowed to be at Ellington, working on our project, which was a welcomed break. Saturday was filled with some homework, but we did take time to see the non-business part of Johnson Space Center, or JSC 'Disney'. This is for the public and is not an operational part of JSC.

On our way over there, we passed this great sign:

It seems that every business that can, will use space or NASA in some way in their name or logo. We have also seen a "Space Station Storage," "NASA Flowers" and other great names.

We traveled first to a local Goodwill, where we picked up some goodies, but then we drove over to "Space Center Houston". Our badges got us in for free, and so we took a few pictures:

They had a risk and probability exhibit and the below picture was one of the first parts - we had to cross over a beam 'high' across the street below.

They had a shuttle landing simulator, and here is photo of me trying to land the shuttle:

Yes, I did fail each time I tried, but only near the very end and I'm sure the astronauts could have made it out alive... I really want to try to land the shuttle simulator at NASA Ames, on the VMS, or Vertical Motion Simulator, that rides on nitrogen hydraulics. When I toured it last summer, they were testing a new idea for a roto-tilt commercial airliner.

I also saw a model of an astronaut in a space chair with a not-to-scale model of the ISS in the background:

Did you know that the bands around his knees are color coded and signify that he is one of the team leads? This way the ground observers can easily tell who is who during a spacewalk.

And here is an older astronaut in another type of space chair:

This following was on the wall where they have pictures of each shuttle and exploration mission crews. It was sort of inspiring to see all the images of the astronauts and then be nudged to think "hmm...that could be me someday..." I'm still not sure if I would like to be a real astronaut someday, it seems like such a tough job.

What about you - will your picture appear on the wall?

At 25,000 ft...the air is a little thin...

NOTE: Any pictures in this post are not mine, I couldn't bring my camera into the chamber. All images are from a group that did this a few years ago, found here, which is why there are no pictures of me or my team. In roughly 4-6 weeks, I should be getting copies from the NASA photographers.

If you've flown on a commercial airliner, then you've gone up and past 25,000 ft in the air. However, you've probably never experienced what the air is like up there. Unless, of course, you've hiked a really tall mountain, though I'm not sure how high even Mt. Everest is in the atmosphere.

One of the prep steps for our flight next week is going through training in the hypobaric chamber. Friday morning we got up early to travel to Johnson Space Center and go to a 4 hour long lecture. We were lectured on everything from how your body reacts to decreasing outside air pressure, to the composition of the atmosphere, to what hypoxia is, to what causes motion sickness and how to avoid it.

For example, did you know that the composition of the atmosphere is the same throughout, though the partial pressure of oxygen decreased with increasing distance upwards. And that when you go up 25,000 ft outside of a pressurized cabin, the gas in your GI track, ears, and teeth (if you had any dental work done lately) will expand. Hypoxia is a condition that comes on when the body experiences a large decrease in oxygen. One might get dizzy, euphoric, irate, confused or just completely out of it.

After the lecture we traveled over to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, or NBL. This is the facility where the astronauts train for their shuttle missions. It holds the 40ft deep pool that contains a full scale mock up of the ISS. They were in there for a number of hours training for the next mission - whatever that may be.

We were fitted for our oxygen masks and helmets - all in your basic military green. Apparently, I have a really small face, so even the smallest mask was a bit large. Apparently they were made for men in the military and men's faces are not super small.

After familiarizing ourselves with the equipment, we all tromped out to the hypobaric chamber. It looks like this:

It is a rectangular box with blue bus seats and consoles for each person. I was seat #16. We hooked ourselves into the oxygen hoses, com mics and went over the flight pattern one last time. We finally got going and starting breathing pure oxygen for 30 minutes. This flushed out about 30% of the nitrogen out of our blood. This helps prevent development of the bends from ascending and descending.

We then 'rose' to 25,000ft at a rate of 5,000ft per minute. Basically, they just sucked the air out of our chamber with a giant vacuum pump. In turn, we dropped our masks and tried to fill out a questionnaire while breathing air severely lacking in oxygen. I got dizzy when I couldn't get enough oxygen; my brain felt really really foggy.

We gently began to descend, at a slower rate than descent, and then it was all over! We marched back to the briefing room and watch the tape of ourselves experiencing hypoxia, filled out a survey, and then took an open-book, open-neighbor quiz over the morning's lecture.

Then our day got a bit more stressful, as we had learned that the people in charge want us to do a full ground test Monday morning at 7:45am. We were not ready, still completely are not, but we had to skip the tour of the NBL to run back to Ellington field to try and get things as ready to go as possible. Please pray that everything goes well on Monday, or there is a possibility that we won't fly :(

And that is how our Friday ended, with a lot of stress. All I did back at home was curl up and take a long nap, eat dinner and go to bed, as I am now, so - goodnight!

T-5 days

Yesterday was our first day on our project and it was quite stressful, to say the least. Pretty much an emotional roller coaster all day long:

When we and all our equipment arrived at the Ellington Airfield (where the hanger we work out of is located) the orientation was intense - don't leave stuff on your table, don't take pictures of the coast guard building (they have guns, which means they win, apparently), don't get in the mechanics way, etc. Oh, and be on time. Always on time, or else you probably won't fly....

Anyways, we got through that and began to set out our test equipment. Unfortunately, they still had not accepted our structural analysis, as the person we had write it up for us did not calculate the correct loads. Supposedly there was a document that said what calcs we needed, but my team never saw it, else we would have followed it to a T! They seemed pretty skeptical that we didn't have the document, but our mentor backed us up and eventually they accepted the fact. They did, however, require some sort of structural test, so we had to load our metal cage for the microwave on the old C-9 airplane and they pulled a 9g load on one bar, with only three of the four corners srewed in. The bolt holes were our fault, one did not quite fit, but we were so nervous that the welds might not hold on the metal structure!

They did however and our whole team let out a collective sigh of relief. Our whole morning had been dominated by problems and the overhanging stress of this structural test. If it did not pass the test (if it broke or bent badly) then we were not going to fly. We also had a boatload of other issues that we didn't see until the whole team was there and we had our mentor's experienced eyes to look over everything. Apparently, everything moves in microgravity - more so than we originally thought. So the morning was also spent thinking like engineers do, trying to come with solutions on the fly. Exhausting to say the least, especially when we had to skip lunch to go to the hardware store.

PS - the C9 we tested on was the 'Weightless Wonder VI', which is the plane that Tom Hanks filmed scenes from Apollo 13 in! Granted, this probably means more to you than to me, as I have yet to see that movie...

Finally, after getting our housing structurally okayed, we were able to begin the process of putting the whole system together and wrapping the whole thing in foam and duct tape to keep the sharp edges from injuring anyone during flight. The result:

This is me looking through the bottom supports:

This is our worktable:

This is our sweet electronics set up that Hannah built to control our microwave:

And then we came home exhausted and got ready to go in the hypobaric chamber...I am kind of nervous for the event!