One year ago today I flew with NASA. That’s right I flew with NASA. Not into space abut pretty close. As a NASA Explorer school we are able to apply to conduct student experiments in microgravity by flying on the Reduced Gravity Jet. Our second graders wanted to see how playground toys acted in zero gravity.
After being chosen, we had quite a bit of paperwork and planning to do. You can see part of the process by looking through the archives of our team blog.
We had to fly down to Houston twice. In December of 2006 we underwent physiological training for the flight. That included a flight in a hypobaric chamber where we were deprived oxygen. It was only for 5 minutes. Very cool experience and we learned loads of stuff about Boyle’s law.
Anyway then we flew down in Feb. for a week long adventure that included the microgravity flight. We did 40 parabolas. The experiments took about 20 parabolas to complete. Then we were able to attempt some fun things that the kids asked us to do.
One of my teammates, Margaret Frick posted a video of some of the fun stuff on Teacher Tube.
