In the second of three posts, Ben Rozitis and Naomi Murdoch, two OU postgraduate students, blog about the exciting project they´re involved in and how they managed to pass the safety tests ahead of their parabolic flight…
After eight or more hours of continuous driving through France by Naomi, the AstEx team and the experiment finally arrive in Bordeaux. It was Sunday 25 October 2009, the day before the start of the parabolic flight campaign, and we check into an apartment hotel right next to Bordeaux airport.
We are so close to the airport that we can actually see the zero-g plane parked up from our apartment window (actually our ‘3/4 person apartment’ is so small that it can be considered to just be a single room).
The parabolic flight campaign lasts two weeks. The first week is a preparation week where experiments of various shapes and sizes are unloaded from vans, assembled, tested, safety reviewed, cleaned, and then, finally, boarded onto the zero-g plane. The second week is the exciting flight week consisting of three flights on consecutive days starting on the Tuesday. The Monday of the flight week is reserved for the flight safety briefing and the highly important issue of flight suits. The Friday is a backup flight day in case one of the three flights is cancelled due to bad weather.
The preparation week - Monday 26 October to Friday 30 October
Due to all the problems we had with the safety reviews of our experiment even before we got it finished and built, we decide to head to Novespace with our experiment on Monday morning to get all the awkward on-site safety reviews out of the way. When we arrive we are asked to sit through a presentation explaining how to work safely in the Novespace premises. After the presentation Ben is asked to hand in all the completed design and safety documentation for the experiment (81+ pages in total), and we are asked to unload and assemble our experiment.
As we have taken the experiment apart and put it back together many times back at the OU, we have the experiment in flight configuration in about 30 minutes. Patrice Rosier (our Novespace contact and safety engineer) conducts his safety review and finds no hardware issues. He is, however, a little uncertain about our method for shaking the shear cell between parabolas (shaking a 27kg object apparently becomes a health and safety concern). He asks his Novespace colleagues for advice (including the CEV doctor) and they decide there aren’t any issues, especially if we increase the length of the handlebars used.
The next day it’s the turn of the ESA engineer to complete his safety review (apparently he was the one giving us all the health and safety grief with our experiment before we arrived). He finds two minor problems that don’t really exist! He wants us to add an extra redundancy grounding cable to the motor (despite it having being tested previously by Novespace that it is grounded properly), and he wants us to add some extra electrical insulation to the light switches (he wasn’t convinced they were rated for 220V despite the data sheets saying they were). So with some very minor changes we easily pass the ground-based safety reviews!
The experiment is loaded onto the zero-g plane (after we had given it a good clean), and for the rest of the week we debug our experiment (it has developed some minor faults) and add protective foam padding to the experiment rack. Ben spends most of the remaining week with his hands on his head working out why the laptops and cameras weren’t working properly when the motor is running. He eventually figures out it is due to electro-magnetic interference from the inverter that controls the motor, and enlists Naomi’s and Tomi’s help to wrap all the camera cables in aluminium foil to fix it.
Tomi (aka the King of Padding and the Sticking Master) spends the rest of the week sticking foam padding onto the experiment rack. Naomi spends the rest of the week helping Ben and Tomi out with their tasks, focussing the experiment’s high speed cameras, sticking affiliation stickers on the experiment, preparing the operating procedures for next week and updating the Photo Gallery page of our website. A few more safety reviews are conducted on the plane which we easily pass, and at the end of the week the experiment is all set to fly…