Group from TRU gains out-of-this-world experience in zero-gravity experiment

Members of Thompson Rivers University's physics club got an out-of-this-world experience recently as part of a national science competition, floating in zero gravity to test an experiment they designed.

Post-secondary students from across the country entered the Canadian Reduced Gravity Experiment Design Challenge (CAN-RGX) and had to fully design, build and test a small experiment to be flown in the microgravity environment.

Of the submissions, five teams — one of which was TRU’s Phi-Six Club — were picked to actually test out their experiment in a plane that simulated double and zero gravity.

The Phi-Six team, based at TRU, had been working on the project for almost two years.

Their experiment looked at what is known as particle agglomeration — more specifically the Van der Waals interaction. Think of it as extremely weak magnets popping in and out of existence around particles. It results in particles either attracting or repelling each other. The net result is particles forming agglomerates.

They did their experiment in a parabolic flight in a small jet. They flew to about 16,000 feet, then the plane nose-dived to 10,000 feet in 20 to 30 seconds. That simulates microgravity, the pull-up from 10,000 feet to 16,000 feet gave the students the equivalent of two Gs (G-force), about double what we normally feel on Earth.

The data collected from their experiment is significant in two ways — it can help scientists understand how the early universe started forming stars, as well as could be used to better filter particles out of the air, like wildfire smoke.

The leader of the experiment, Johnny Gilchrist, started working on the theory before the rest of the team was chosen.

“I spent the first summer all alone working on it. So I got all the theoretical work done, and I had an idea on what to do,” Gilchrist said.

“It was exciting. But I also knew that it was going to be a lot of work, because it just getting to the submission alone is a lot of work. And then, looking at the entire timeline.”

But many of the team members said all that work paid off.

“It is a huge accomplishment, because this is the culmination of two years worth of work. So it was really satisfying, not just going to Ottawa but actually collecting some useful data that we can hopefully write a paper about, and hopefully make some changes, or help other people with our data,” Phi-Six team member Cooper Wendland said.

Without the resources provided by the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, the Canadian Space Agency and the National Research Council of Canada, who collaborated on the design challenge, the team may not have ever been able to test out their experiment, or experience double and zero gravity.

Another Phi-Six member, Josephine Brewster, said double gravity felt how she expected it might.

“The 2G felt kind of exactly what you'd expect it to feel like,” Brewster said.

“If you've been on those fair rides before where you're like spinning around, you're like trying to lift your arms up — it’s exactly like that, except you can just feel your face being pulled down, too, so that was really weird.”

According to Wendland, the feeling of micro or zero gravity was harder to explain.

“The closest I can get is it’s kind of a mix between if you've ever been on a roller coaster or driving a car and hit a hill and you feel yourself lift a little bit up in your seat and your stomach feels strange,” he told Castanet Kamloops.

“It's almost like that feeling but not quite.”

For team leader Gilchrist, the experiment was only the second time he had ever been on a plane — the first being when he flew to Ottawa for the event.

“I tried to get the team to make it [the experiment] my first flight. But they didn't like that idea,” Gilchrist laughed.

The team is still analyzing the data collected from the trial, and if the results are good, they said the next step will be writing an academic paper.