SCIENCE IN THE SKY Northwestern students lift off with NASA on a zero-gravity quest.
BY JASPER SCHERER
S
ix miles above the Gulf of Mexico, Krysti Scotti presses her bright orange tennis shoes firmly against the white interior wall of NASA’s C-9 airplane. Here in zero gravity, where easy tasks become difficult and difficult tasks become nearly impossible, Scotti must come up with creative ways of keeping herself in place: by contorting her body into positions straight out of a child’s game of Twister. While the plane descends 10,000 feet in roughly 30 seconds, Scotti freezes a slurry of ice and titanium oxide nanoparticles by placing the mixture inside a
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small, cold copper box while trying to maintain her position. Felicia Teller, one of Scotti’s teammates and a fellow Northwestern School of Continuing Studies student, battles zero gravity’s effects as she clutches a spiral-bound notebook. Others, suspended in midair, spin in circles while grasping a thin strap that runs along the wall of the plane. Scotti’s long black hair floats haphazardly. The area inside the C-9 is contained chaos. “I tend to get in a zone and everything is kind of slow-motion-like,” Scotti says of zero gravity. “It’s hard to remember actu-
al feelings during that time. And since we need to use our hands, we brace ourselves in goofy configurations.” Scotti, who is 34 years old, has flown twice in zero gravity—most recently as part of the Flight Opportunities Program (FOP), a NASA-run operation in which teams like the one Scotti has led for the last two years conduct research that would not be possible on Earth’s surface. As a much cheaper alternative to spaceflight, teams fly in the C-9, an aerodynamic jet that travels in a series of parabolas to achieve zero gravity within Earth’s atmosphere for brief 30-second periods. Photo courtesy of NASA/James Blair
