For a brief time last February, Diana Chai was her own guinea pig. Strapped to a treadmill in a NASA research plane, she calmly jogged in place as the KC-135 executed a series of zero-G dives 50,000 feet over central Texas.
"It was amazing, the best experience ever," said Chai, a junior majoring in bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. "And I didn't even throw up."
Chai, 20, and three other UC Berkeley students participated in a special NASA program that gives college students access to one of its unique assets, a research plane often referred to as the "vomit comet" that simulates the weightlessness of space.
The NASA Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program has been in existence since 1995 out of NASA's Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston, administered by the Texas Space Grant Consortium. Chai and her co-scientists, the first UC Berkeley students to apply for the program, proposed to test an improvement to the treadmills astronauts pound regularly in space to prevent bone loss and potential injury. Without such high-impact exercise, astronauts can lose as much as 2-3 percent of their bone mass per week.
With the help of NASA scientists and a borrowed 500-pound treadmill, the team spent two weeks, Feb. 8-17, at Ellington Field near Houston setting up their experiment for two flights of the same Boeing KC-135A used to train astronauts. On Feb. 13, during their first series of 30 zero-G dives, each 30 seconds long, Chai and recent UC Berkeley integrative biology graduate Lanny Rudner, 22, were the guinea pigs, running at 6.5 miles per hour while strapped into the treadmill. A day later, Chris Hamerski and Bev Guo, both 22, flew another series of tests.
Just for fun, each group reserved a few parabolic dives for floating and tumbling around the plane, an experience Chai compared to the Drop Zone ride at Great America.
"I'm still on a high from the trip," she said.
As for
'"/>
Contact: Robert Sanders
rls@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley
2-May-2001