Pictures from the Flight

HUNCH teams for Zero Gravity week.  Some are from Montanna and Colorado.

We shared our glove box with another team from Colorado.  Our experiment is the small one in the front of the picture

It's amazing how small we got our plant chamber to be!

Ground crew after the flight getting things off of the airplane.  There were about 8 different glove boxes that had experiments in them for this flight. 

2nd Zero Gravity Flight

The 2nd Zero Gravity flight took place late yesterday afternoon.  The experiment went a little better although we did still get some water leakage and one of our moisture sensor wires came loose.  The students did get some video on their go-pro camera so I am hoping to upload some of that to the site as well.  Once their plane landed, the ground crew got on board and started doing some de-stowage of the experiment and glovebox.  We then took the experiment out, took it apart and we did some analysis on the events during the flight.  We have some valuable moisture sensor data that we will now pull into a software program to give us some valuable feedback and we were able to determine where the water leak was coming from.  Engineering Design always has its re-designs.  All in all the flight was a success and has given us the ability to determine some new ways to improve the system prior to an International Space Station Flight. 

Post Flight Coolness

Part of our experiment glove box

Jason trying to access our experiment inside the glovebox

Ground Crew getting ready for 1st flight

2012 Zero G Flyers

Zero Gravity Flight DAY!

Yea!  We are finally here.  It has been very busy this morning.  We have two flights today.  The Two students that flew first had an early briefing pre-flight, took their anti-nausea meds and then got ready for their flight.  Ground crew got on the plane and finished taping down wires, making sure the experiment box was set in place and not moving, and then did a final computer check to make sure all systems were a go.  1st flight took off at 9:45 am and returned at 11:30 am.  We had some issues on the flight...our GoPro camera didn't work as expected, we had a few wires become unsauldered, and we had some minor issues with water leakage.  We have had just a few hours to get these issues fixed.  Good to say that they are all fixed at this point and should be good for this afternoon's flight.  Guess this is what engineering is all about!  LOTS of tweaking going on!

Tuesday Activities

Today the students went to anti-motion sickness training and worked on their engineering challenge at NASA.  At the end of yesterday we realized there were some leak issues, so we had to take apart our tubing and re-seal our connections.  So, this afternoon we spent lots of time testing our hardware/software and making sure that there are no leaking issues.  We have been anxiously waiting our software code from our Microcontroller mentor Steve Bress, who is helping us from Maryland.  We are looking forward to our flight day tomorrow, but for today we are still chugging away at8:30 pm! 

TRR pictures

Alex getting plant chamber ready

Micro Camera Ready to go

Zach getting our tubing sealed and ready

The famed microcontroller that runs the whole show!

Yes, these are Toys.  For our educational Outreach part of our program.  They will be used on the zero gravity flight

Zach getting our solenoid ready

The System.  Yes, that is a hairdryer.  It is used to help reduce cure time for our adhesives

Zach explaining our experiment to one of the new members of the 2009 Astronaut Class

Zach showing how the microcontroller works

The Clear Springs Team at Ellington NASA Hanger 990

Monday was a busy day for the students.  They got their experiment ready to go for the TRR (Test Readiness Review) where big NASA officials come around and they have to explain their experiment and the officials make sure that everything is safe.  After the TRR is complete then, it's time to get our experiment loaded into the NASA glovebox and then loaded onto the zero G plane.  The NASA glovebox has to be padded to ensure that when the zero G flyers are coming back into G mode from weightlessness that they don't get hurt on any sharp edges.  Inside the aircraft we hung our Clear Springs NASA banner and then got the glovebox bolted into the floor of the aircraft.  We got the knee straps and hand helds locked into place so that the flyers have something to hold onto during weightlessness.  After loading the plane, then the student flyers were getting their flight suits to prepare for their flight day on Wednesday. 

More Build Phase Pictures

Taylor is drilling holes to insert the IV tubing into our plant chamber

We have three layers of boxes.  This is the middle layer that will hold the entire plant chamber box and the blue part is gortex to allow the natural exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen for the health of the plants.

This is the plant holder.  It will hold 4 rockwool sections with the plants and the big hole in the center will deliver the nutrient solution from the IV bags.  The smaller tubes will hold deliver the solution to each of the plants

This is the inner box that is the plant chamber.  The upper section will hold the plant cube.  The bottom part will hold the IV bag and the solenoid to control delivery of the solution from the IV bag and the upper section that has the big hole is covered in lexan.  Our small microcamera will be going above that to take pictures of the experiment.

Here are some more building phase pictures. 

Friday's Activities

Friday was a very busy day for the Team.  We started with badging at NASA JSC and then the students divided up into Flyers (Physiological Training) and the Ground Crew (Systems Engineering Presentations and then began an engineering Challenge).  Then, we went to orientation and finally to Ellington Hanger 990.  Students began getting their experiments ready for Monday.  We got to meet a lot of different schools today from Montanna, Wyoming, Colorado, Georgia, Wisconsin, Florida, and Texas.  This is the largest flight week the Zero gravity Office has seen with 18 different schools (some universities, some highschools).  We have some things to get figured out over the weekend on our programming of our microcontroller but we should be ready for the Test Readiness Review on Monday.  I am so proud of the team!  They are doing a great job.

Build Phase

Here is our Build Phase of our project.  This is our Plant group working to determine what kind of plant chambers we should have for our experiment box and how we would water and give nutrients to our small plants. 

Tommorow it Begins

Tomorrow begins our Zero Gravity Flight Week for our NASA HUNCH Class.  We are working on a plant growth chamber that will is VERY small and will be fitting into a 10 cm3 box.  It is part of the nanorack system and we hope it will fly with the Nanorack company to the ISS very soon.