The Friday Zone is WTIU’s children’s show for 7-12 year olds. It's now in its 12th year and is currently the only regular kids' show produced in Indiana.  The show airs across most of Southern and Central Indiana on both WTIU and on WFYI in Indianapolis.  Along with pre-produced stories and DIY activities, each episode of our show has a featured guest related to the topic.

On Friday February 10, Prof. Steven Collicott will be guest on the program in their space exploration episode. He joined them for taping on January 25 on the set in Bloomington and took with him some videos, experiment hardware from successful flight tests, and simple drinking-straw type of demonstrations of “capillarity”, or the physics of capillary action (wicking) of liquids.  The experiments and demonstrations came from his AAE 418 class activities which focus on the NASA Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program.  This program is also known as the Zero G class and the airplane is affectionately known as the “vomit-comet”.   

Prof. Collicott and the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics have been involved in the NASA Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program since the program began in the fall of 1996. He specializes in research and engineering on low gravity fluids topics and he advised the first few teams of students as an extra-curricular educational activity. Collicott then created an upper-level undergraduate course for students to design zero-gravity flight experiments specifically for the NASA program which then became part of the curriculum. In all, it is a team-based, hands-on multidisciplinary experience.  Because of AAE 418, “Zero-Gravity Flight Experiments”, Purdue AAE students lead the nation in successes in this NASA competition, with the thirtieth AAE team building now for flight testing in June, 2012.

Periods of weightlessness lasting about 25 seconds during downward "parabola" give students scant time to ready their experiments for the next parabola. The plane varies the steepness of its maneuvers, and this varying steepness produces different degrees of weightless. Most of the maneuvers reproduce the weightlessness experienced by space shuttle astronauts flying in orbit around Earth, but a few of the maneuvers reproduce the gravity on Mars and the moon.