Flight Day!

Wednesday turned out to be a hectic day as we had both flights almost back to back. The proficiency flight still hadn't occurred but was already out on the runway ready to go when we arrived at Ellington around 7:30am. I attended the morning briefing where we were given the schedule for the day. We were assured we would have enough time to get everything loaded and that we'd have about 20 minutes to talk to the first flight flyers before we needed to load the plane.

The C-9 arrived back around 9am or so and we were allowed on at about 9:30am. The flyers went into their pre-flight briefing at 9:10am and we carefully moved all our cells out to the tarmac for quick loading onto the plane. As soon as the aircraft was open, we slowly carried each cell on-board and placed them on our structure.


They each were wired in and the back panel put on for flight. It took us about 45 minutes to get everything on board. The flyers all boarded the aircraft before we were able to get off. Michigan Tech had to load their experiment during this time as well since they had specific power needs. They had a lot of difficulty getting it bolted down, but eventually everything was set and they were good to go.

We hung out in the high bay next to the Reduced Gravity Office for a while until the plane was ready to take off. At this point we headed outside and watch the C-9 taxi out to the runway and takeoff towards the Gulf of Mexico.


We had about 2 hours before the flight would be back so a couple of us went to the store to purchase a few more camera tapes for the second flight. When we got back we ate lunch and waited. The plane landed and we again brought out the second flight day cells so they'd be ready to load. We all went out to the plane to greet the flyers as they came off. They went immediately into debriefing after a picture and then we were able to talk to them.

It turned out that most of our particles extracted which was very exciting news. The liquid cells however had a few issues. The larger size orifice cells had some of the liquid spill over during take-off. Some of the liquid was recovered during the 1.8-G period but there was still some that remained above the knife-edge. The biggest issue though was that there was a large dip in the meniscus during microgravity. This meant there wasn't a level surface for Taylor cones to form. The flyers said they did think they saw some cones though. Other than what they told us we didn't have time to really look at videos and data to make changes. We decided to drain a little bit of the liquid out of the cells to hopefully prevent spill over during take-off.

I set up a station in the high bay where I was able to drain the liquid and then take the cells up to the aircraft. The new cells were installed the same way on the structure once the old cells had been removed. It took a bit longer to fix everything this time but we got everything set. The flight took off late again. The weather was beautiful and a great day to fly. I drained cells and saved all the liquid for later analysis. Eventually the plane landed and we got the second shift flyer's account. They said there was a lot of arcing going on, but they did see Taylor cones. Fortunately they were able to get through all the tests.

We left Ellington field shortly after the flyers landed. We all went to Kroger and bought food. Most of us got steaks and grilled them back at the hotel. We ate outside as the sun went down. Before and after dinner we took a look at the flight videos from the front view camera. The lighting wasn't great so it was hard to tell what was going on, but you could see the bubble/dipping issue the flyers were talking about. We're not really sure why that occurred since that seems like it would be something that would happen in the 1.8-G period rather than microgravity. It will be interesting to see what kind of results we can pull from our data.