Texas State students fly NASA-style

SAN MARCOS, Texas (KXAN) - Seven Texas State University students flew aboard the NASA microgravity, also known as zero-gravity, aircraft during an electrochemistry experiment in June.

All of the students are members of the Texas State University-San Marcos Chemistry club, and the experiment is part of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program.

More than 60 applicants from universities nationwide applied for the program. Texas State was one the 13 schools selected to participate and fly during the competition, which accommodates 72 teams per year.

The team’s project was overlooked by, Ben Martin, assistant professor of chemistry and Amber Newport, an assigned NASA advisor who has previously flown aboard the aircraft.

The program is designed to provide undergraduate students the opportunity to successfully fly and evaluate a reduced gravity experiment. The students are also responsible for proposing an idea, which is later designed, fabricated and executed in the weightless atmosphere provided by riding in a Zero-G plane that goes over the Gulf of Mexico.

“It was really cool to see all the ideas that the other schools came up with because we had such a hard time just figuring out experiments that we could do in zero gravity,” said David Doughty, part of the groups team flying crew. “Each team had their own idea, and nobody had overlapping experiments.”

The team’s goal was to observe how convection currents that were formed in a liquid with different densities would change the operation of an electrochemical cell, said team leader Nick Mustachio.

Starting with construction and ending with flying, the project took about a year to complete. But, their hard work seemed to pay off once they were aboard the Zero-G plane.

“The first few (time we went around) I strapped myself down, as per their warning,” said Doughty. “At first, I was completely content with letting my arms float around, and I was thinking, ‘this is awesome.’”

Forty years after NASA’s Apollo 11 moon landing, the students knew this was an event to remember.

“One of the flight directors told us before hand to ‘make a memory,’” Mustachio said. “To use one parabola away from our research to just float up, look around and see what it looks like; to soak it all in.”

“I looked around the cabin and I saw that people were upside down and sideways,” said Mustachio. “(One of the team flyers) sunglasses were just sort of floating there right in front of me and it‘s like you‘re floating in a room—you have no sensation that you‘re falling.”

Now that they’re back on ground, the team is reviewing, analyzing and preparing the data they collected from their performance for a final report to be turned in to NASA.

After that, Mustachio said that the team hopes to see what they can publish, as well as put the word out there about the program and what it has to offer.

“Floating in zero-gravity—it’s something I never thought I’d be doing my senior year of college,” said Mustachio. “It was probably the wildest flight I’ll ever take in my life.”