Graduate
student Mr. Brian Hynek of Washington University, will be featured at
the May meeting of the Saint Louis Astronomical Society. The meeting
will begin at 7:30 pm Friday, May 18 , in McDonnell Hall, Room 162,
on the Washington University campus. McDonnell Hall is accessible from
Forsyth Boulevard via Houston Way. The presentation, cosponsored by
NASA's Missouri Space Grant Consortium, is open to the public free of
charge.
One
of NASA's training tools for astronauts is a KC-135A cargo plane adapted
for simulating a zero-gravity environment, twenty seconds at a time,
for a total of fifteen minutes per flight. This is done by flying a
roller-coaster-like path, with a six mile climb followed by the twenty
seconds of free falling toward the ground - a series of loops repeated
thirty times per flight. For obvious reasons, the aircraft is nicknamed
"The Vomit Comet". Two teams of college students made a flight
in March, one to test heat transfer devices and the other to test a
portable fire extinguisher for Space Station use. Brian Hynek, a Doctoral
candidate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington
University, accompanied the teams, the winners of this year's Reduced
Gravity Student Flight Opportunities competition. Mr. Hynek will talk
about his experience aboard this unique simulator.
Brian
Hynek's primary interest involves studies of the surface of the planet
Mars, using space craft data from several NASA missions. Working with
his advisor, Professor Roger Phillips, he is constructing three dimensional
models of part of the huge Martian canyon systems, and using them to
predict how flowing water might have shaped the surface hundreds of
millions of years ago.