Thursday, April 5, 2007
When you stand up in an airplane, you don’t usually float toward the ceiling. But that was the experience four University of Kansas engineering students had last week on NASA’s C-9 “Weightless Wonder” aircraft.
The students used the aircraft, which simulates a zero gravity environment by free-falling from high altitudes, to test a mechanical arm that could make docking space shuttles to the International Space Station safer.
“The airplane is a flying laboratory,” Aaron Terrell, Auburn, Ala., senior, said.
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The purpose was to see how this works in the environment it was designed for.
- Aaron Terrell, Auburn, Ala., senior
Terrell, along with Laura Stiles, Prairie Village junior, Michael Hochman, Kansas City, Kan., junior, and Eric Simmons, Kansas City, Mo., junior, have been building and testing the docking device at a Learned Hall laboratory since December. The team proposed building the prototype arm to NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program in September, which has funded their research. Other funding has come from the school of engineering and other campus organizations.
Hochman said the arm was composed of several stiff wires connected by vertebrate-like supports. He said the wires are made with shape memory alloys, which have the ability to “remember” a pre-set shape. When subjected to electricity on Earth, the wires contract and cause the arm to partially coil.
“It’s kind of like taking a string and twisting it at both ends,” Hochman said.
The arm’s purpose is to make space shuttle docking safer by grabbing the shuttle and guiding it into a docking position. Hochman said that the current NASA rendezvous maneuver was dangerous; astronauts basically ram their shuttle into a small target on the space station.
“They have to give astronauts special training just to perform this maneuver,” Hochman said.
The team traveled in late March to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and spent 11 days touring NASA facilities and preparing to test the arm in NASA’s C-9 aircraft. The team separated into pairs and flew in two separate trips on the aircraft.
“The purpose was to see how this works in the environment it was designed for,” Terrell said.
The team expected the device would make a complete coil while in zero gravity, Terrell said. The arm coiled as expected, but would work better if it had a stronger structural support.
“We have a very preliminary design,” Terrell said. “We know from the results we need to modify the design to make it more useful.”
Terrell said that while on the flight, he felt like he was swimming, except that when he flailed his arms and kicked his legs he did not move.
Stiles said the team would soon make a final report for NASA that summarizes the project’s results. She said she hoped to perfect the arm’s design and reapply to the NASA program next year in order to perform more flight tests.
Kansan staff writer Nathan Gill can be contacted at ngill@kansan.com.
— Edited by Jyl Unruh
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Corrections: April 6, 2007
Corrections from Thursday's The University Daily Kansan.
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