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.

Our proposal explored how thin strands of liquid, suspended between two moveable supports, would handle the stresses of entering and exiting microgravity. To record the stability of these “liquid bridges,” we would construct an apparatus that films the bridges while a three-axis accelerometer records the motion of the C9. In January 2005, AAPT announced that our experiment was one of six proposals that had been selected to fly. Our experimental results have been posted online.¹ Also, NASA's website, http://zerog.jsc.nasa.gov, has hundreds of photographs of our experience (under the “Student Campaign” link).