The University of Arizona Microgravity Team with their experiment to study the effects of gravity on fault formation. From left to right: Joel Mueting (Senior, Aerospace Engineering), Andrew McGuckin (Senior, Aerospace Engineering), Danny Pagano (Senior, Science Communication, Amanda Urquiza (Senior, Math), Eric Sahr (Senior, Geoscience System Engineering) - Credits: Nathan Wong

The University of Arizona Microgravity Team with their experiment to study the effects of gravity on fault formation. From left to right: Joel Mueting (Senior, Aerospace Engineering), Andrew McGuckin (Senior, Aerospace Engineering), Danny Pagano (Senior, Science Communication, Amanda Urquiza (Senior, Math), Eric Sahr (Senior, Geoscience System Engineering) – Credits: Nathan Wong

The University of Arizona Microgravity team was selected to participate in the NASA Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program. This group of six students designed and built an experiment testing fault formation in Lunar and Martian gravity and five of them were able to go to the NASA Johnson Space Center and test that experiment aboard the G-Force One microgravity laboratory. Students came to this project from a range of disciplines including Geosciences, Math, Aerospace Engineering, and Science Communication. One trait all of these students share is their interest in space and involvement in the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) organization.

The NASA Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program provides access to undergraduate students to perform experiments in “Zero G” or microgravity. Short of actually flying into space, microgravity is achieved by flying an airplane in a parabolic maneuver between 20,000 and 32,000 feet in the air. The plane enters the parabola 45° nose up and increases altitude. During this time the inside of the plane experiences between 1.8 and 2 times the force of gravity felt on Earth’s surface. As the plane reaches the top of the parabola thrust is reduced causing free fall, and the inside of the plane experiences “Zero G.” Varying the parabola characteristics can produce other ranges of G-levels including that of the Moon or Mars.

The University of Arizona experiment studies gravity’s effect on fault formation. In tectonic environments, thrust faults form at 30 degree angles relative to the direction of gravitational acceleration. The aim of this study was to see if this angle changed under varying gravitational conditions. During the parabolic flight, ground experiments were replicated in Lunar (1/6 G) and Martian ( 1/3 G) Gravity.

Reduced gravity is an underutilized field of study for geosciences. Most geosciences experiments don’t even take gravity into account. The experiment could have wide-ranging implications for the study of planetary science. Data from this flight could find fault formation to be affected by the local gravitational acceleration and that might affect the way we study tectonic and geologic activities on other planetary bodies.

This experiment was unique among the fourteen other undergraduate experiments in two ways. The first is that it focused on geosciences rather than engineering, and the second is that the experiment utilized the Lunar, Hyper, and Martian parabolas for the experiment and not microgravity portions. Not only does this give a bit of insight into areas that NASA thinks are important, such as planetary science, but also shows importance of experiment design to utilize portions of the flight that are not normally used for acquiring research data.

In Part 2, we’ll get a look at the experience of flight week and the results of the fault formation study.

– By Nathan Wong. Nathan Wong  is a technical and media consultant for the Google Lunar XPRIZE. He is currently based in Strasbourg, France at the International Space University. Nathan has also performed two microgravity experiments with the University of Wisconsin – Madison. 

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