Michael Boyle has wanted to be an astronaut ever since he attended space camp at the age of nine. This week, the Yale senior may get one step closer to that dream when he flies aboard a specialized Boeing 727, which makes parabolic dives that allow its passengers to experience weightlessness for brief moments at a time.
Boyle is one of about 15 members of the Yale Drop Team, an undergraduate group of mostly physics and astronomy majors who design, build and fly experiments onboard the 727 as part of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, created to give undergraduate students a unique opportunity to conduct scientific experiments in a reduced-gravity environment.
“Lots of people on the team are interested in careers with NASA, so this is a step in the right direction,” says Boyle, who is team captain for one of the two projects the Yale Drop Team will conduct this year.
He and the four other members of his team are flying their experiment on two flights between April 7 and 18 at the Johnson Space Center’s Ellington Field in Texas.
Boyle’s team applied for one of the competitive spots in the nationwide program last fall. Once accepted, the team was assigned a project being worked on by one of the resident scientists at Johnson Space Center, who studies the link between esophageal cancer and radiation — something that astronauts experience a lot of — and the possible implications for long-term space flight.
The team will test a cell culture apparatus they designed and built, using the reduced gravity environment onboard the aircraft to test ways to inject and expel liquid in and out of the different chambers of the apparatus. If everything goes well, their design could eventually be part of an experiment that ends up on the International Space Station.
As the only biology major on the Yale Drop Team, Boyle enjoyed having the chance to work on a project with real-world applications in his area of study.
“I like the idea of solving an actual problem that NASA has and being able to implement a solution in real life.”
Of course, “real life” on board the airplane — affectionately dubbed the “Vomit Comet” for the effect it can have on its fliers — is far from ordinary.
The plane makes 30 parabolic dives, producing about 25 seconds of zero gravity each time, during the course of the two-hour flight. As Boyle discovered during his first flight as part of the team two years ago, the feeling can be overwhelming.
“I think it’s best described with a photo of me with a huge grin on my face that was taken just as I started to lift off the floor,” he recalls. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Joe O’Rourke, another member of the Yale Drop Team, flew last year and likens the experience to “riding a roller coaster that never ends.”
O’Rourke is leading the team’s second experiment, which will fly June 17-26 and will explore the physics of dusty plasma — ionized gas - containing microparticles. It will be the third time Yale will fly a dusty plasma experiment, and the second time for the sophomore who, along with his teammates, had to submit a 60-page proposal to NASA last fall before finding out their project was one of 14 chosen from across the country. The team will investigate the crystalline structure of dusty plasma and the changes it undergoes in microgravity; this year they have redesigned their vacuum chamber and added a more sophisticated imaging system.
“Gravity really mucks up a lot of the equations governing the physics, so taking that away lets us study the plasma more simply,” O’Rourke says.
While some schools involved in the NASA program get credit for their efforts, the Yale team spent many hours designing and building their projects outside of normal classroom hours. Helping them along the way was their faculty adviser, Sidney Cahn, a research scientist in the physics department.
But the hard work was worth it, agree the students. For the team, it all culminates in that other-worldly feeling few ever have the chance to experience.
“It really is like being in space,” O’Rourke says. “It makes commercial flights really boring.”
— By Suzanne Taylor Muzzin
