Melrose Man Flies High in Zero Gravity

Earlier this summer, Melrose resident Gary Garber was floating in zero gravity high above Houston, Texas, completely weightless.

A team of fellow teachers from Boston University Academy (BUA) accompanied Garber onto the plane, which soared above NASA’s Johnson Space Center at Ellington Field. This was all made possible thanks to the Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program which lets K-12 teachers, along with undergraduate students test their own experiments while flying weightless inside of a Boeing 727 better known at NASA as the “Weightless Wonder”.

But in order to earn a ride aboard the famous zero gravity flight, Garber had to face a long and grueling application process. Besides picking his team of educators, he wrote an extensive proposal for his pendulum experiment.

“I also had to explain how I would publicize the results of the experiment and use it in the classroom and share it with the general teaching community,” Garber explained.

The bulk of the application was centered on the TEDP, or Technical Experimental Data Package, a report about 50 pages in length which included a stress analysis, and a hazard analysis on every single part of the experiment.

While Garber, along with BU engineering undergraduates and professors, designed the general idea of the experiment, the BUA students built the pendulum themselves.

Members of the BUA FIRST robotics team 246 assembled a metal aluminum frame which held together either a string or rigid rod pendulum in place for the experiment. A common high school experiment, the idea was to measure what affect the length of a pendulum has on the period of time it takes to swing back and forth.

“The period of time is also affected by the acceleration due to gravity, which cannot be varied in your standard high school classroom," Garber said. "So we performed this experiment in several levels of gravity including heavier gravity, martian, and lunar gravity.”

The training for the flight involved “several seminars of what not to do," Garber said.

“Most to prevent you from getting sick,” he continued. “Imagine a 90 minute roller coaster ride. And you cannot get off.”

So how did the experience of total weightlessness feel?

“It was a blast. First time, I want to go back. Just floating was amazing. I felt like a superhero. I kept looking for a phone booth to
do a quick costume change.

"They didn't have one on the plane,” he joked.

The data from the zero gravity experiment was collected using a wireless Bluetooth accelerometer that could measure concrete numerical data for the experiment. All previous attempts at Garber’s experiment had only utilized methods of video footage for capturing experimental data. The video he took of the flight will be published to YouTube, and the data will be downloadable as a lesson plan via his blog.

“Students will then be able to use this data to develop the dependence of the period on the acceleration of the pendulum due to gravity," Garber added.

In the future, he will also be presenting the experiments with lesson plans at the Fall Regional National Science Teachers Convention in Hartford and the fall New England American Association of Physics Teachers Meeting.

Later in the summer, Gary made another trip to Palmdale, California, to attend programs with Teachers in Space and the Space Frontier Foundation, the commercial branch of the space industry.

“There, I was working on an experiment which will launch this fall on a commercial spaceship run by Masten," he said. "The goal of this second program is to eventually send hundreds of teachers into space on the XCOR spaceship in 2014."

On the topic of the recently changing environment of the space industry, Garber said that “I got the strong sense that private enterprise will be filling the gap that NASA is leaving in low orbital taxi service and experimental work, while NASA goes after the deep space research.  We toured Masten Space System and had presentations from XCOR, I was very impressed with these companies.”

When asked what he learned from his first trip on the “Weightless Wonder” Garber joked, “I learned to design future experiments for people with short arms (me).” He added, “I learned a lot about stress analysis and engineering calculations. I got a greater sense of the future of NASA.”

If you’re interested in learning more about Gary and his trips this summer you can find his blog at: blogs.bu.edu/ggarber