#DefyGravity (My experience in zero-g!)

Just imagine- you are laying on a white, padded floor of an airplane. Your friends and fellow researchers are around you, and excitement is in the air. You have butterflies in your stomach and you hear the hum of the C-9’s engines…. and suddenly they get quiet. All of a sudden, you and everything inside of you, your fellow researchers- are floating. You are in zero gravity.

I had this exact amazingly fortunate experience during the second week of this month. You may or may not know from my other posts, but I am the team lead of the Orbital Ospreys, a research team from the University of North Florida. We are studying the effects that the zero gravity environment of space has on bone cell density, and we were one of 14 teams in the entire country selected to fly on a NASA zero gravity flight.

This was a very special flight for a variety of reasons. First, this was our very first time ever applying to fly in zero gravity and we were accepted on our very first proposal submission (which is quite the rare feat!!!!). Secondly, after being accepted in December, NASA cancelled the program in April, meaning this was the last round of flights NASA will be doing for a very long time. This made us even more fortunate for being accepted on our very first submission; if that had not happened, we would have never flown and our research would be dead.

We were selected, though, and have been working very hard since January to get our experiment ready for flight!

We went to NASA JSC/Ellington Field for an entire flight week. It was really amazing, and 5 members of my team and I got to experience zero gravity, (plus did some really great data collection for our experiment!). We also got to see some of NASA’s aircraft, the Neutral Buoyancy Lab (the GIANT pool with the ISS mockup that astronauts train on for spacewalks), and my team exclusively got a special tour of Mission Control and the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, where we got to see and enter some mockups. It was truly amazing!

Some of the pictures and videos are included below, but for more, I definitely recommend liking the Orbital Ospreys on Facebook. We have a lot more pictures there!