Monday!

Sorry I didn't get this posted yesterday but I was exhausted. We had a lot of information thrown at us so let me share some of it with you.
To start off the day, we got our badges!! Apparently, when I flew from home to Houston I grew a whole foot. The back of one of my badges says I am 6'01"! I'm guessing this badge belonged to somebody else at one point but I still thought it was funny.

Next, we had go over the Aerospace Physiology Briefing. During this time they explained all of the different symptoms that we could experience during this flight and what they could be from. Some of the things that they mention include: hypoxia, hypoxic hypoxia, hyperventilation, trapped gas, sinus problems, gastrointestinal tract, teeth, vision, proprioceptive sense, and motion sickness. Hearing about all of things made me extremely nervous to go on the Weightless Wonder. They told us stories of how someone's filling in their tooth had an air bubble and the filling came off on the Weightless Wonder. This person had to deal with the pain until the flight was over. Yikes! Luckily, they told us how to prevent some of these and what to do if we started to feel any symptoms.

After hearing about all of the symptoms, we mad our way to Ellington Field to set up our experiments! The experiment that I will be doing on the Weightless Wonder is the Inertial Balance. In this experiment, we will be placing film canisters that have different weights in them and see how many times they oscillate (swing back and forth). We pull the hacksaw blade that is wrapped in red electrical tape back about 6 inches and let it go. We then count the oscillations for 15 seconds. One oscillation is when it swings from the starting point back to that point. We will be recording our data using a handy clipboard that we can strap onto our leg. There are nine different known weights and one unknown weight. I will be incharge of doing the canisters labeled 7, 8, 9, and unknown. We will have a camera placed inside of the glovebox so we can record the entire experiment. We are also using an Ipod Touch with the accelmeter to show our students that the gravity is changing. We ran through the experiment once today and we are feeling very comfortable with preforming this on the Weightless Wonder! My excitement is starting to over power my nervousness!

The other experiment that we are doing is the Projectile Launcher. This one will be flown on Thursday. In this one, we have two different size ball bearing that we will launch using a spring launcher and record the distance that the ball traveled vertically and horizontally. The launcher will be tested at 0 degrees and 30 degrees. The launcher will also be pulled to its full capability (we call this A) and half of its capability ( we call this position B). In this picture, you see my teammates Veronica and Amber. Veronica has her hand in the black glove shooting a ball bearing. Amber is watching to see where the ball bearings go and recording their data. 

We have met some of the other teams that are flying and we have seen what their experiments looks. There are a lot of neat experiments that are going to be flown and I cannot wait to hear about every ones results! Here is a list of everyone that will be flying on either Wednesday or Thursday.