Last week saw the start of ESA's 35th Parabolic Flight Campaign. Twelve teams from seven European countries and Canada and Russia gathered at Bordeaux-Mrignac Airport, in France, to prepare and fit their experiments inside the modified white-padded Airbus fuselage. On 14 October 2003, the A-300 lifts off for the first of three consecutive flight days.

Flying 31 parabolas each two-and-a-half-hour flight provides experimenters with about 10 minutes of weightlessness per day. Rockets and space flights provide much longer and continuous weightlessness, but only on parabolic flights can experimenters ride alongside their experiments.

The experiments on board are very diverse. They range from assessing how bubbles form in artificial blood and testing an exercise machine designed for astronauts to studying the behaviour of so-called 'complex plasmas' found in cometary tails and judging the effectiveness of weightlessness surgery. The one common factor in the experiments is their need for weightlessness.

Bubbles in blood

How do bubbles form in simulated human blood? A Belgian group from the University of Brussels is linking up with investigators from the Universities of Thessaloniki and Thessaly in Greece to find out. "We use a tiny quarter-millimetre heater to produce the bubbles in the liquid," explains Professor Thodoris Karapantsios of the University of Thessaloniki. "It's the same thing when bubbles form in the blood of divers experiencing the 'bends', or a spacewalking astronaut suffers an explosive decompression. Gravity and convection currents do not distort these bubbles. They stay spherical and keep stable which makes th
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Contact: Dieter Isakeit
dieter.isakeit@esa.int
31-071-565-5451
European Space Agency
15-Oct-2003