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Free Fall in the Zero G

Technician Alex Camargo retrieves a drop vehicle after its 432-foot free fall in Glenn’s Zero Gravity facility
A drop vehicle is retrieved after free falling 432 feet in the NASA Glenn Zero Gravity facility.

Mechanical Engineering Technician Alex Camargo retrieves a drop vehicle after its 432-foot free fall in NASA Glenn’s Zero Gravity Research Facility. The drop vehicle, which weighs about 2000 lbs., contains hardware for the Saffire experiment, which is being developed to study how fires behave in spacecraft in microgravity. The Zero-G research team was verifying the ignition system design.

Microgravity, a condition of relative near weightlessness, can only be achieved on Earth by putting an object in a state of free fall. In the Zero-G, low gravity is achieved for 5.18 seconds as the drop vehicle falls inside a 470 ft. long vacuum chamber.

Image Credit: NASA
Bridget R. Caswell and Mark Grills (Wyle Information Systems, LLC)