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34th ESA Parabolic Flight Campaign Day Two: sickness-free in zero-G 
The 'Zero-G' A300 Airbus flew further and longer than usual on Wednesday's flight, on the second day of the 34th ESA Parabolic Flight Campaign. The result was a series of turbulence-free microgravity arcs – and the first ever ESA parabolic flight by the A300 without a single passenger being sick! The flight lasted almost an hour longer than usual. After an initial parabola showed turbulence, the pilots went on a hunt for better weather, heading all the way up to French Brittany from their Novespace base at Bordeaux-Mérignac Airport. Student experimenters from the University of Regensburg were especially glad to be aboard. Known as the 'Upside Downers', they had a bad day Tuesday, when their electric engine - used to shake granular materials to see how they settle in microgravity - burnt out.
They had to work well into Tuesday night to replace the engine as well as replace a broken collector box. "We finally tried out the shaker in our hotel room," said student Mark Rickhey. "It was quite loud and the neighbours complained!" The good news is that on Wednesday the experiment worked fine.
And experimenters from the Universitie de Paris-Sud are assessing the best of various ways of combining gas and liquid to make foam in weightlessness – everything from whipping to gas jets to spraying – as they evaluate chamber designs intended as part of the International Space Station's planned Fluid Science Lab (FSL).
"Foam is created by combining gas and liquid, and you end up with something that then behaves like a solid," said Principal Investigator Arnaud Saint-James. "The underlying process remains mysterious but foams in orbit will be longer-lived and much simpler to study."
The subjects working with Belgium's University of Louvain team are seated while they grip an object between their thumb and forefinger and move it round in a circular motion. Sounds simple enough, but they're instructed in 1G, told to start as the first bout of 1.8G sets in and keep the object moving through microgravity and back to 1.8G again as the plane levels out.
As the value of gravity shifts these test subjects have their arm motion tracked by a camera system as well as sensors in the object itself. All the time their eye movements are also being recorded: the intention is to study hand-eye co-ordination and how visual feedback helps determine the correct direction of the object and the gripping force needed to keep hold of it. This research could provide swifter methods to acclimatising astronauts entering microgravity (as well as those returning to Earth).
Data gathered during the mission on longer-term cardiovascular adaptation to microgravity will later be compared to shorter parabolic microgravity responses. It was hoped the Oddissea crew would be reunited for Wednesday's flight, but in the event only Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne was able to make it.
"As a test subject, I didn't have to do anything except stand still and breathe," said Frank. "That made the flight a little less comfortable, because there's nothing to distract you from the feeling of the gravity shifts. I actually prefer space to zero-G flying – parabolic flights are difficult to get used to."
The Pulmonary Function System (PFS) is a joint NASA-ESA instrument measuring how lung performance alters in microgravity. It works non-invasively, by analysing how the mix of gases in the breath of its test subjects alter between inhalation and exhalation. Flying it on the Campaign is a chance to test the instrument works in microgravity as well as do science.
The ESA PFS Project Manager John Ives volunteered as a test subject on Wednesday's flight: "It was very interesting to experience it from the other side, so to speak. It went well."
They are studying how commands move from the motor cortex of the brain along the spinal cord to the muscles of the arm, how we instinctively perform arm movements without ever unbalancing ourselves, and how the strength and pattern of the brain's electrical commands may alter without gravity. The team do this by applying brief electromagnetic pulses to the brain and tracing (using electromyography or EMG) the resultant action potentials along the spine and trunk to muscles. The team use trained dancers as well as 'naïve' subjects because the former exhibit greater control over their trunks than ordinary people. The team's aim is to better understand how brain, limb and trunk interact, and so improve rehabilitation of individuals recovering from strokes or spinal injury.
Test subjects have to have a magnetic stimulator held to their head along with multiple electrodes attached to them, but Kitsou had no complaints: "The experiment is very worthwhile, and microgravity is always enjoyable – a moment of pure movement."
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