Purdue School of AAE's unique undergraduate class, AAE418 “Zero-gravity Flight Experiment,” has been selected by NASA as part of a nationwide competition to develop and test a prototype asteroid chipping tool.

The student team, led by Brian McGuire, proposed their original design for a tool for astronaut use on future space exploration missions. Their proposal, "Purdue University - Experimental Asteroid Chipping Tool (ExACT)," has received final approval from the Micro-g NExT review committee. The students are now building their chipping tool and will travel to the NASA Johnson Space Center in early June to test the instrument.

Testing will be performed in NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL) which is a large pool used for various training and testing purposes, most commonly for Extravehicular Activity (EVA or spacewalks) training for NASA astronauts. Purdue Aeronautics and Astronautics students will operate the testing from the control room, guiding the astronauts underwater in the NBL through the necessary testing steps.

AAE418 "Zero-gravity Flight Experiment" is one of several long-running hands-on design-build-test classes in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue University. These in-depth engineering classes provide Purdue School of AAE students with opportunities to apply theory and modeling to create original solutions to challenging aerospace problems.

In AAE418, Professor Steven Collicott has led student teams to thirty-two parabolic aircraft flight experiments with NASA since 1996, eight automated payloads for commercial sub-orbital rocket flights, and one undergraduate space station experiment which NASA then cancelled in the prototyping stage.

AAE418 Team (pictured, from left): Brock Miller, Brian McGuire (team leader), Matt Gripe, Brian Smith, Sam Sauers, Maxime Pinchaud, Tyler Murray.