They day started out with our daily briefing and then we received our anti-nausea medication. It didn’t help me. As I was about to go out for my preflight briefing, and engineer found me and told me he was going to ground me if I couldn’t show him the frequencies of the blue transmitter I was using with our WDSS. So we went on board the airplane, I found the documentations and all was fine. Next, the preflight briefing where we learned how to handle ourselves in the plane.
We boarded the plane and had a seat in one of the several rows in the back of the plane. Take-off was fine and didn’t take long. About 20 minutes after take-off we got out of our seats and set up our experiment. We then braced ourselves for the first parabola. The hypergravity wasn’t a problem. I grabbed a strap with both hands for the first microgravity arc. But my feet were not tapped down. Suddenly, I was upside down and I was doing a somersault near the top of the place. I came back down a few seconds later and all was well. But I think I paid for this 15 parabolas later. We ran the experiment and it was amazing to watch the string pendulum floating in microgravity. The experiment ran successfully. However, the GPS sensor was unable to acquire a signal. We gathered great video footage of the pendulum and all the sensors worked well.
I didn’t find the hypergravity all that bad. A lot of people would lie down in the hypergravity but I found kneeling was fine. But the transition from hyper to microgravity did me in and I had breakfast for the second time. But the Blue Suits were right there to help me out. At that point I had a chance to watch the people in the plane floating up and down. It was an amazing sight.
After we got down we tweaked the experiment and made some small updates. We had an afternoon lecture from an engineer from the flight suit design section. It was interesting to listen to the evolution of the flight suit.
