No matter what club students join at Brown, they can pretty much guarantee they won't end up floating inside a Vomit Comet, a plane that rapidly climbs and dives to simulate zero gravity.
That is, of course, unless they join the Brown Space Club. The Space Club has been accepted to NASA's Microgravity University, as it has nine of the past 10 years.
Five members of the group will travel to Johnson Space Center in Houston for 10 days. There they will conduct experiments inside an airplane that uses repeated ascents and descents to create the experience of weightlessness because of microgravity, a state in which the effects of gravity are almost nil.
The plane is dubbed the "Vomit Comet" by participants and the "Weightless Wonder" by NASA. Over two days, four students go up in the airplane, making 30 to 60 cycles on the plane each time in order to perform their experiment.
Jon Zucker '09, co-president of the club, described the feeling of weightlessness: "It's like swimming with no concept of up or down, and when you move you don't actually get anywhere."
"The plane flies in parabolas in order to simulate zero gravity," Matt Kretschmer '10, a member of the club, explained. The continued loops create 25 seconds of weightlessness on descent followed by 35 seconds experiencing twice the effects of gravity, he said.
"That's really how people get sick, the transition from microgravity to 2G," or two times the force of gravity, he said.
This year, the club will attempt to study the use of sound waves to manipulate liquids at zero gravity, Kretschmer said.
"We thought there might be a need in space travel. If there is a spill, there is a need to contain it," he said.
The club works to draft the 25-page proposal, which it sends to NASA. Throughout the year, members of the club also visit local schools to talk about their experiments and to teach the importance of the space program.
"There's a lot of invention that you wouldn't have expected to come from the space program - such as velcro," Zucker explained. "How to inhabit space could be very important."
The trip to the Johnson Space Center includes a full tour of mission control, a view of the swimming pool where astronauts are trained and an in-depth discussion with an astronaut. "I didn't want to be an astronaut until I went down to Johnson Space Center," Kretschmer said.
Over the past decade, the focus of the experiments has changed with the interests of club members.
"We have a wide variety of people in the club," Zucker said. Concentrators in biology, engineering, neuroscience and economics can all be found among the approximately 15 members of the club, half of whom are freshmen, he said.
The club receives some resources from the University and gets a grant from the Rhode Island Space Grant Consortium, an organization that encourages interest in space exploration.
