Miss P vs. the Vomit Comet

WOW! It's so crazy to finally be here! I got in on Sunday around 4:30 and met up with one of the teammates to get our hotel room. We got our stuff in the room, then went to pick up another team member at the airport. We made a WalMart run on the way back to the hotel and ran into our other team members! So our first time that all five of us were together in person was at a WalMart...not quite what we were expecting.

Yesterday we started off the morning with our physiology training. Of course, we had no clue what to expect, so I was kind of surprised to find out it was really more of an instructional time where they told us things that could go wrong. I think the point was to make us feel a little better and more sure of the situation, but it just made me more nervous. I knew I could get motion sickness, but I wasn't prepared for hyperventilating and hypoxia, trapped gasses, and protective breathing equipment. Our instructor told us about all these different things he had seen go wrong, but didn't exactly specify that he witnessed them while he was in the military and not on Zero G aircraft.

Then we went to Ellington Field, which is where we are spending our time. At Ellington Field, all seven groups who are flying experiments in Zero G have little tables in our hangar. Inside the hangar with us is the Vomit Comet. I actually learned there is a difference between the Weightless Wonder and the Vomit Comet. The Vomit Comet has been retired and is almost memorialized at the entrance to the NASA buildings on Ellington Field. The Weightless Wonder is still being used, but is not actually the plane we are going on. We will be going on the G Force One...which I find funny because we won't be doing 1Gs, we will have nearly 2Gs against us, then go into microgravity. We spent the day going over our experiments, doing ground testing, and preparing for our TRR. We had to figure out how to work our experiment so we can record the data as accurately as possible, then did lots of tests so we could gather data in Earth conditions of gravity. The nerve wracking part was hearing about our TRR and what to expect. TRR stands for Test Readiness Review, and basically it is a large group of NASA people (15-20 people) who question how safe our experiments and outreach items are for flying. We had been told stories of how small objects had floated away in microgravity that almost caused serious plane accidents.

We ended the day and had a few hours before our supper with all the other undergraduate teams (because three of the teams that are going with us are people who work for NASA testing things for use on the International Space Station). Long story short, we got some bad directions from a Toys R Us employee and were almost an hour late to our supper. But after we ate, we got to talk to the other teams and see where they were from and what their experiments are. On our Zero G Faculty page on facebook we have been putting links up to their information...definitely worth checking out!

Today, we had the morning to prepare for our TRR. Our mentor wanted us to make sure we could run both experiments just in case we had to change things, so we switched our groups around and attempted working our second experiment of projectile launching while our other two team members worked on our inertial balance experiment. After getting so used to our inertial balance yesterday, it was difficult adjusting to their experiment. Once we collected another round of ground data, we went back to our experiments and prepared for out TRR. We had a very large group of NASA personnel observing us, and it was kind of stressful, but afterwards Jamie (our mentor) and Ashle (our flight lead) told us they didn't think it could have gone any better.

Once we were done with TRR, we checked out some of the other experiments before we loaded ours onto the Zero G plane. They only let two team members go up for the load, so Allison and JoAnn (the two other teachers flying with me tomorrow to test the inertial balance experiment) went up on the plane to strap our experiment in. After a while, I was able to go up and help out. We had to set up our camera mount so we would be able to video us working on our experiment without random people's feet and heads floating into view. The bad thing was, Houston is very hot, and since the plane was not running, there was no air conditioning. We had all the emergency exit doors opened, the back hatch we walked through open, plus the giant hatch at the front of the plane open, but there just wasn't enough breeze to cool us down.

After all the experiments were loaded, we got to get our FLIGHT SUITS! All the group was laughing because I was so amped to get my flight suit. Of course, I had some sizing issues getting a suit that wasn't too short or too big on me. But I found the perfect one and proceeded to take a ton of pictures! Then we watched a video about preventing motion sickness...and boy, was it a cheesy video! But they talked to us about things we can do to help us not get sick. Our team thinks if we follow those instructions and take the flight meds, we will have a No Kill flight. "No Kill" means that no one pukes, and even though so many of you have voted that I will puke on our poll, I am going to try my hardest to avoid that!

And now...PICTURES!

My badge and handbook (with Tess on the cover!)

This is the glove box with the experiment I will be testing. The film canisters have different weights inside and we will determine mass based off the oscillation rate.