Project Update!
Hello Everyone!
My name is Morgan and I am a senior studying Biomedical (Biochemical) Engineering at USC. First, I wanted to share how I decided to become and engineering major. As a student-athlete in high school, I saw a lot of my friends suffer from various injuries, inspiring me to pursue a medical career as I applied for college. Unfortunately, I'm pretty severely squeamish, so being a doctor was out of the question. When I toured USC, I learned about the Biomedical Engineering program and knew I had found a way to contribute to the medical field. While my motivations and goals have changed since high school, I've found new aspects of BME that interest me. Biomedical engineering is a really cool program where you learn the theory behind developing medical drugs and devices.
I got involved with our microgravity experiment through being friends with some pretty cool people. So far, it's been a great opportunity for me to work with different types of engineers, research and learn about a topic that is new to me, and get some hands on experience in the lab!
Our project has been coming along really well, we finished our first prototype box! The box will be used to enclose the rest of our experiment, and we will bring four of them up on the flight, each one containing a different gas mixture. As seen in the picture shown below, the box has two holes on the sides. The rectangular hole will have a sealed door that can be opened to access the experiment before and after testing. The circular hole will have a rubber membrane that will allow for pressure changes during the flight. Our next step is building the carousel that will hold the wax balls to be burned.
We've also been doing some other cool things. Last Friday, we spent the day with Mr. Burke's eighth grade science students at John Adams Middle School. We had a blast going over our research project, basic science lessons behind it, and introducing the students to opportunities like the DIME and WING programs for them to get involved with. At the end of each class, we played jeopardy to review what the students had learned.
Until next time,
Morgan
Allow Me to Introduce Myself
Hey Guys!
I first off wanted to introduce myself. I’m Molly (the second weirdest person in the group behind Vlad) and I’m a SENIOR studying Mechanical Engineering and Spanish. I decided I wanted to be an engineer in the seventh grade after I went to space camp at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center (GO THERE IT’S AWESOME)! I loved space and all things NASA so much that I returned for rounds 2 AND 3 of space camp and then became a camp counselor for a program right after I graduated from high school. Needless to say, it was the greatest experience of my life. Not only because I got a seriously sick employee discount on astronaut ice cream in the Cosmosphere gift store, but also because I got to see other kids inspired by the same things I had been (and still am) inspired by. Anyway, long story short, when I was at camp I learned about a program that gave college undergrads the chance to fly onboard the infamous VOMIT COMET and I knew that when I went to college I absolutely HAD to do that. So here we are, 10 years later, and I am preparing for my flight week in June. IN LESS THAN SIX MONTHS I WILL BE FLOATING. Moral of the story: SCIENCE IS AWESOME.
Me totally paying attention... per usual.
So as much as I’m sure you’d love to hear more about me, after all I DID once get 50 likes on a Facebook post (I tell my roommate Morgan that it’s my greatest accomplishment in life), I’m dying to update you on our progress! I guess the most obvious thing is this AWESOME WEBSITE. Turns out Colin is a WEB DESIGN GENIUS and this little creation is all thanks to him learning web design in less than a day. Last Friday, we had the chance to talk to Mr. Hwang’s 8th grade class at Foshay Learning Center consisting of over 60 students! We told them all about microgravity and NASA and a little about combustion, heat transfer and even the ideal gas law. They were so awesome and asked us lots of great questions and totally rocked the Jeopardy game at the end. Seriously, I don’t think I was anywhere near that smart in the 8th grade.
As for design work, we’ve started putting together a prototype of our experiment to test in terrestrial gravity before we take a ride in the VomCom. We hope to have it all done this weekend… Post to follow, I promise!
Molly over and out.
We're Accepted!
We, The Univeristy of Southern California Microgravity Research Team, have been accepted to perform our proposed experiment on NASA's very own Vomit Comet! We've been accepted to participate in the Microgravity University, a program set up for undergraduate students to propose and conduct an experiment using NASA's Vomit Comet. Now starts the real work. From here we need to apply for funding, teach as many middle school to high school aged students as we can about what we're doing, and of course, construct and test our experimental setup!