Flying with NASA
Carthage’s space sciences program is a nationally recognized undergraduate program that provides students with hands-on opportunities in technology development and atmospheric sciences through partnerships with NASA and academic researchers around the world.
Often, those “hands-on opportunities” are feet-up opportunities. Carthage students have spent more time in zero g than the first astronaut in space.
Carthage students and faculty regularly conduct research aboard NASA’s zero-gravity aircraft. The zero g plane provides periods of weightlessness by repeatedly climbing to 35,000 feet, free-falling 10,000 feet, and climbing again.
It’s the ultimate roller coaster ride — but they’re also doing real science. The Carthage Microgravity Team is working on a novel method of measuring fuel in zero gravity, a project NASA selected as key for the development of long-range space exploration.
In other space sciences projects, Carthage students are designing, building, and launching payloads on NASA suborbital rockets, and building from scratch a groundbreaking new satellite that will eventually provide multispectral images of Earth.
Video transcript
My name is Tessa Rundle and I'm going to be a senior at Carthage College. I'm a Physics major and this summer I'm working on a zero-gravity fuel gauge experiment as a part of Carthage's Microgravity Team. We traveled to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and got to fly on their zero-gravity research aircraft.
We are about to glide parabolas and fall from the sky on purpose. At the bottom of every parabola, you experience about 20 seconds of 2G. And then at the top of every parabola, you experience 20 seconds of zero gravity. So this was a really great opportunity to conduct research with NASA because not a lot of people get to do that, especially as an undergraduate.
The cool thing is that NASA is actually interested in the technology that Carthage has developed. They came to us and wanted to use our fuel gauging method and they wanted to give us this flight opportunity. And our method that we developed could actually be used in space in the future.
So the experiment that Carthage has developed tests a fuel-gauging method for zero gravity. In zero gravity, you can't use the same methods of fuel gauging as you can on Earth. Being weightless is really an indescribable feeling, you are just kind of sitting there in the plane, not really expecting anything, and all of a sudden, you feel a shift, and you're just floating, and you're weightless. And it's a really awesome experience.
The very first parabola that I first felt zero gravity, I don't really know, my first feeling was just like, "Whoa!" It was just totally nothing like I've ever experienced before. We flew alongside professionals in the space science industry, which was really cool because it helped build some connections. And they're doing jobs similar to the ones that we want to have in the future. So that's really cool to be able to see what their day-to-day jobs are in what they do.
Going on this trip really helped me get my foot in the door for future opportunities, internships, and just kind of seeing what it's actually like to work for NASA and to work in the space sciences. My biggest surprise was how personable everyone was and, and I guess, like how well I understood what some of them were doing. I kind of felt like I would have no idea what some of the like professionals' experiments were doing. But in reality, it's just it's basically what we're doing not the exact experiment or science, but they have the exact same design processes we do. So it's all the same thing, just having different goals for their experiments.
So another awesome thing about the trip was being able to tour some of the facilities at NASA that the general public doesn't really get to go in. So we got to go into Building Nine, which is the space vehicle mock-up facility. And in Building Nine, we got to go inside the shuttle trainer where all of the astronauts that wrote on the space shuttles did their training. We got to see some of the International Space Station training modules. We got to see some robots that are actually being used on the International Space Station to perform tests and we got to see where they were being tested and developed. And we also got to see the MRV and arriving MRV.
If I hadn't gone to Carthage, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to work on experiments with NASA and have the opportunity to make connections for the future that could lead me to a career in the field.
[Did] you guys get yours out there?
We just did. Yeah.
Oh, awesome!
