Summer 2024 AAE 418 Zero Gravity Flight Experiment
Summer 2024 AAE 418 Zero Gravity Flight Experiment
AAE418 “Zero-gravity Flight Experiment” in Summer 2024
With Professor Collicott
This design-build-test class is offered in the summer. We work on real-world flight experiments, and the real world doesn’t stop in the summer, so I don’t get to stop in the summer. It is 3 credits, meeting 10 hours per week for 8 weeks. AAE students can take AAE418 for credit twice.
Thus summer we will continue work on:
- “CryoBubbles”, a liquid-nitrogen experiment for parabolic flight. It will fly in April and then later in 2024 or early 2025 so there will be a lot to do for adapting it and ground-testing components and system operations.
- PREFER, a sensor payload to fly on a handful of sub-orbital rockets in the US. Launch dates keep slipping but that’s out of our hands, we build the payload. Might fly this summer.
- Balloon glider for lunar gravity parabolas – we are designing and building the prototype for a multi-user “laboratory” in a stratospheric glider. This is in collaboration with a US high-altitude balloon company.
- Atmospheric Sampling, a demo experiment to sample air in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere regions of our atmosphere. That’s about 60km to 100km altitude. To fly on a suborbital rocket to lead the way for atmospheric and climate researchers to put modern reusable commercial sub-orbital rockets to work.
- Drop tower, we are working to install roller coaster brakes in the 2-second drop tower here in Armstrong Hall. There are many steps and spring semester made a great start. Summer should continue designing some parts and start building some other parts. Brake mount, guide rails, and drop package are all new so there’s a lot of work to do.
- Rotational Slosh, data processing if we have enough people. The hardware will be ready at the end of Spring semester, so no more hardware work is needed.
Pictured: AAE 418 team at the December 2023 Blue Origin Misison. We flew the "2D Slosh" payload for NASA on this flight.