~Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Webpage

News and Updates

All our hard work paid off with a successful flight week in Houston, Texas!  Click here to view pictures of our flight preparation and actual flights.  Preparation included classroom training, a hypobaric chamber run, and a 'test readiness review' to assess the safety level of all participating experiments.  Photos of the University of Michigan team can be found under the following links (Look for the University of Michigan flag on the plane!):

March 5 Chamber Group A

March 8 TRR

March 11 ZGSC Flight and March 12 ZGSC Flight

We achieved three successful experimental runs on each flight and are currently in the process of analyzing our data and preparing a final report for NASA.  Please contact us with any outreach ideas, or if you are an undergraduate student who wants to participate in next year's reduced gravity program. 

THANK YOU to all our generous sponsors!  Without your support, our team would not have made it to Houston to participate in this once in a lifetime opportunity. 

The UMCMC team would also like to extend a special thank you to the following people:

Professor Margaret Wooldridge, our technical advisor
Chris Chartier, Technician
Dave McLean, Technician
Eric Kirk, Technician
Tom Griffin, Technician

Experiment Overview

This experiment will study and characterize the novel combustion system of solid phase magnesium-iodine metal combustion in carbon dioxide gas under microgravity conditions.  It is predicted that the addition of iodine as a catalyst to this system will generate more steady combustion rates and yield improved combustion behavior for this system. 

Flame buoyancy caused by the presence of gravity introduces an intrusive diffusion effect into the Mg-CO₂ combustion system, yielding burn times twice as fast as those in microgravity [Branch et al., 2001].  Because our study intends to characterize Mg-CO₂ combustion for application on Mars, it is absolutely crucial that our experiment is run at reduced gravity conditions to yield a clearer understanding of the Mg-CO₂ combustion process and the associated effects iodine generates as a catalyst in the system.  With the removal of the buoyancy diffusion effects caused by the presence of gravity, we can also determine the essential fundamental reaction rates.  The KC-135A can be used to simulate both microgravity and gravity conditions on the surface of Mars.  Both of these conditions are necessary for characterizing our system and cannot be readily generated on earth at sufficiently long test times. 

It is our hypothesis that the addition of solid phase iodine to magnesium metal as a catalyst in Mg-CO₂ combustion will desirably steady the combustion process and enhance conversion efficiencies.