Discover the world of reduced gravity!

Since the fall of 1998, Dr. Greg Ojakangas has led groups of physics students in the design and implementation of experiments aboard NASA's reduced gravity aircraft known as the "Weightless Wonder", through the NASA Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program. In this exciting program, experiment proposals are developed and submitted to NASA, upon which they compete with others in a rigorous review process.

Upon selection by NASA, students prepare their apparatus and fly it on the aircraft, experiencing thirty to fifty individual twenty-five second periods of complete weightlessness as the NASA aircraft flies along parabolic "freefall" trajectories. Our first experiment, which we continue to revise and improve, has been an effort to simulate Keplers famous laws of planetary motion using electrostatic attraction, a force that behaves mathematically much like the force of gravity. Small electrically charged spheres (very much like planets) are placed into orbit about an oppositely charged central sphere (very much like the sun) in the zero-gravity environment provided by NASA's Weightless Wonder.