SPACE ODDITY

Gravity, in a Middle School science lab and elsewhere on Earth, is inevitable. Launch an object in the air and it will always tumble back down. In the classroom, discussion of gravity and its impossible absence requires a degree of imagination and hypothesizing. Or, if you’re Middle School Science Teacher Mike Mailey, you take a trip on Zero Gravity Corporation’s “vomit comet” to experience weightlessness and conduct your class experiments there.

Mailey was working on forces in motion with his class when Zero-G’s medical consultant specialist and Collegiate alumnus Marsh Cuttino ’86 and Middle and Upper School STEAM Coordinator Dan Bartels serendipitously approached him with an opportunity to take a flight on what is infamously known as the “vomit comet,” Zero-G’s plane that flies in a parabolic motion at altitudes reaching 32,000 feet to simulate weightlessness. With the opportunity, Mailey was able to take a theory his class was hypothesizing and test it in a zero-gravity simulation.

“A bulk of our first quarter was about finding gravity on Earth and doing experiments to verify what gravity is on the surface of Earth,” Mailey says. “Then, suddenly, I’m given this opportunity with Zero-G, where we’re able to remove the variable of gravity from the equation.”

Before taking the trip down to Florida, where the Zero Gravity Corporation is stationed, Mailey worked with his class- es to discuss what kind of experiment they’d run. In class, the students had been studying a principle called the Magnus effect, which explores how certain ob jects spin and lift through the air while others rise and fall in an arc. They imagined that, without gravity, a cylindrical ob ject’s lift would continue on its glide path, never suffering the weighty pull of downward force.

“The students got to do some experimentation with variable changes while we still had grav ity,” Mailey says. “And then we were able to make a hypothesis about what would happen when we remove the force of gravity and only have lift.”

Students then constructed the objects they’d send with Mailey in the Zero-G simulator, fashioning the ends of two small cups together to make a tubelike gadget. To incorporate the Lower Schoolers in the experiment as well, Mailey, in partnership with Lower School STEAM Coordinator and Engineering teacher Frank Becker, asked the students to use Alex Wolf’s pattern alphabet (pABC) to decorate the objects, in which they emblazoned the cups with various designs that would dance as the objects spun.

“The pattern alphabet is a way to organize different kinds of patterns and symmetries and asymmetries,” Mailey explains. “And with this cross-divisional collaboration, the Lower and

Middle Schoolers were able to think about different kinds of swirl patterns and imagine what those patterns might do when put in motion for a really long time.”

Dressed in a blue Zero-G space jumpsuit and Collegiate baseball cap, Mailey boarded the “vomit comet” with his students’ cylindrical objects.

At the zero gravity segments of the maneuvers, Mailey launched the objects, which spun on endlessly. “It was incredible,” Mailey says. “And the students’ reactions from watching me conduct the experiments were equally awe-inspiring. They were enthusiastic because they got to confirm their lift hypotheses. I think this experience showed them the work involved in experimentation — it showed them that experimentation requires a certain commitment to the inevitable trials and errors of science.”

After reestablishing his relationship with gravity and his knotty stomach, Mailey reflected that the experience reaffirmed the rigor and excitement involved in a Collegiate education.

“This whole experience speaks to the impact Collegiate alumni have on education — that people such as Dr. Cuttino are always thinking about how to expose current Collegiate students to exciting things in the industry,” he says. “I think this is an indication of what a dynamic place Collegiate is. We get to ride on the cusp of where science, engineering and art are going, weaving together a student experience that is full of possibility.”