Thank You for Flying the Vomit Comet

This paper describes our flight aboard NASA's C9 “Weightless Wonder,” an aircraft that creates multiple periods of microgravity by conducting a series of parabolic maneuvers over the Gulf of Mexico. Because passengers often develop motion sickness during these parabolic maneuvers, the C9 is more affectionately known as the “Vomit Comet.” To celebrate the 2005 World Year of Physics, AAPT, APS, and NASA co-sponsored a contest in which teams of high school students and their mentors could fly an experiment aboard the Vomit Comet. If selected, students would develop their experiment and travel to Houston to serve as “ground crew” while the mentors would actually fly aboard the C9 to perform the experiment. ©2007 American Association of Physics Teachers

Contents

• BODY OF ARTICLE
• T-Minus Eight Months
• T-Minus One Week
• Flight Week
• Our Flight
• Acknowledgments
• REFERENCES
• About the Author
• FIGURES