Our final day - Flight #2 C9

Today was the day that Mrs. Lewis flew on the Zero G plane. She had an amazing time and didn't let the "Vomit Comet" live up to its name. No plastic bags necessary! When you are floating in zero gravity it's very tempting to make swimming-like motions, but you might just kick someone in the face! The feeling is almost undescribable! We spent the afternoon watching videos that were made for every school who flew this week. Some pretty cool experiments flew for NASA. We had to say goodbye to Ellington Field and NASA people for awhile. We're all looking forward to coming home to family and students. See you all soon!

Flight Day #1 Zero G

Unbelievable experience today! Mrs. Wright and Mr. Hammond got to fly with their experiment in zero gravity. We did a total of 30 Parabolas in zero G, one in Lunar gravity, and one in Martian gravity. Each parabola gave us between 20 & 25 seconds of weightlessness and we had to work fast. It took us a few parabolas to get used to the sensation enough to focus on our science. But soon, we were like a well oiled machine with Mrs. Wright working the glove box and Mr. Hammond on the timer and trying to avoid flying feet! Our balloon experiment went great and we can tell you that helium and argon float like everything else in zero gravity! We also discovered that static electricity has much more influence "pull" in zero G then it does in Earth's gravity. It was great to see Lake View students and teachers today via video conference. We have some very interesting data to bring back to school. Mrs. Lewis will be flying tomorrow so stay tuned. Jiji gets to fly twice! Take a look at our video clip from inside the plane.

Wednesday

Today we finished our experiment setup and successfully loaded it onto the Zero G aircraft. Then we were fitted with flight suits and briefed on anti-motion sickness. We learned that you shouldn't move your head suddenly when the plane is going into 2G or nose-up. We are hoping that the motion sickness medication they give us will prevent any breakfast from coming up!! Mrs. Wright and Mr. Hammond fly tomorrow and Mrs. Lewis flies on Friday.

Johnson Space Center Tour

Today we went on an amazing tour of Johnson Space Center. We saw exact replicas of the modules of the International Space Station and Space Shuttle. We learned about future Shuttle missions and the next generation of delivery to the ISS and moon called Ares and Orion. We worked for a bit more on setup of our experiment and then had an interesting briefing on great resources that NASA has available to teachers. We got some Reduced Gravity pins that we'll bring aboard our flight and then give out to our RGO students upon return.

TRR, Hypobaric Chamber Flight, & Neutral Buoyancy Lab

What a full day for the Lake View RGO team! We started with a morning briefing and then our Test Readiness Review. It was our presentation to all the important NASA engineers about the safety of our experiment. It went well and they didn't have too many questions for us....so I guess we passed the test!

Next, we were off to our Hypobaric Chamber Flight. They issued us a gas mask and flight helmet. Then they basically put a bunch of us into a steel room and sucked all the air out of it (to simulate flying up to 25,000 ft) while we breathed pure oxygen from our mask. At that altitude we had to remove our mask for 5 minutes and see how our body would react to lack of oxygen or "hypoxia". Some people became very silly, sleepy, dizzy, or had fuzzy vision. The idea was to recognize how you might react should anything happen on a real flight. Everyone survived and Ms. Wright even taught the NASA doctors a few things about how to clear your ears upon descent!

Last, we had a wonderful tour of the NBL or Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. This is the 6.2 billion gallon "pool" where astronauts train to do space walks. They actually have real mockups of modules from the ISS in the pool so trainees can practice fixing things while in space! It was fascinating and again gave us a sense of appreciation for all that these NASA employees do for us here at Johnson Space Center!

Check out Jiji....he's traveled here from Huntington Beach!!

Weekend

We started our weekend today with a Geocaching expedition led by our resident Geocache expert, Mr. Hammond. We were successful in finding 4 caches and not all were in obvious places. We also had lunch at a Texas original BBQ restaurant called T-Bone Tom's, featured on a Food Network show, "Diner, Drive-Ins, and Dives". It was fantastic! Then it was off to find a NASA souvenir shop. We picked up some nice NASA gifts for those students who we hear have made good choices in the care of our substitutes!! Lastly, we met together to do some work and practice for our experiment review on Monday.

Our NASA Mentor Sarah

This is a photo of our NASA mentor who is assisting us with our project. Lake View students will remember Sarah from her visit to our school earlier in the year. We borrowed her from her important job on the space shuttle. She is a rendezvous officer at Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center.