The Zero Gravity Research team is a group of students that apply for the chance to perform Zero Gravity experiments in NASA's C-9 aircraft, affectionately known as the Vomit Comet. The Vomit Comet is an airplane that flies up to a high altitude then goes into a free fall simulating zero gravity for those inside the plane. The Vomit Comet repeats this process several times during each flight, giving the participants inside 30 second intervals to perform their experiments. Below is a picture of the Vomit Comet in free fall.

Below are two pictures of MTU students from our enterprise that got the chance to ride the Vomit Comet. When they take you up they give you a few chances to acclimate yourself to the zero gravity.

Four member of the team get the chance to ride in the vomit comet each year. This year’s research project is a reflight of last year's.  It is related to Dr. King's Ion Space Propulsion research. 6 undergraduates are working alongside with one of Dr. King's graduate students. Jason Makela is the graduate student working with the Zero Gravity team helping them design build and test the testing apparatus. Below you can see Jason(left) and an undergraduate solder up wiring components for the testing apparatus.

Below you can see last year's testing apparatus that was strapped into the Vomit Comet to conduct the Zero Gravity research. This year's apparatus will be similar except, we will have to find a way to reduce it's weight down to 300lbs as per NASA's new rule. The testing apparatus is a mobile vacuum chamber. The vacuum chamber is needed in order to form Taylor Cones with Indium tipped Tungsten wires that can be used for Ion Space Propulsions systems.

Ion Space propulsion has been an increasingly popular topic over the years, it gives you the means to propel objects in space without using any significant amount of propellant. Conventional space propellants are gasses that are expelled from the space craft that are quickly depleted and irreplaceable.

Liquid metal ion sources (LMIS) have been widely used and studied because of the extremely bright, focused ion beam that they produce. Liquid metal ion sources can be used for both ion emission when heated, and electron emission when cooled. This is possible due to the Taylor cone formed during ion emission, which is frozen when the heat is removed, and proceeds to act as the sharp tip required for electron emission. When used in electron emission mode, the primary failure mechanism is damage to the fragile tip. Using a concept recently developed at Michigan Tech, damaged tips can be reformed. Such emitter tips are essentially regenerable and can be reused again and again for interchanging ion and electron emission. Recently, research has been focused on applying this technology to electric space propulsion, where ion emission would be used for propulsion, and electron emission would be used to balance out the overall electric charge of the device. Our team’s goal is to test this technology in zero gravity to simulate actual outer space operating conditions. Emitter tips, fabricated by coating sharp tungsten tips with indium, will be used for ion emission during flight and will be subsequently quenched in zero gravity. The geometry of frozen Taylor cones will be studied using scanning electron microscopy and by inducing electron emission from each tip to estimate the tip radius. The results from zero gravity testing will be compared with results from equivalent tests carried out in the laboratory, allowing us to determine the effect of gravity on the final structure of the frozen Taylor cones before they are used for electron emission.

Below is a vacuum chamber with a microscope affixed to the front with a viewing glass that is used to analyze the Tungsten tips.