Previous Drop your Thesis! experiments
Every year ESA selects a team that will be given the opportunity to perform a 2 week campaign with the Drop tower, resulting in 5 launch opportunities.
Tracing the penetration of large drops in several porous media
The Dropping Drops team is composed of two masters and one bachelor student from the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. The team aims to study the penetration of a liquid droplet into a porous surface in its short inertial phase.
Flexible Electromagnetic Leash Docking system
The FELDs team is composed of five master degree students from the University of Padua in Italy. They have tested an innovative tethered soft docking system using electromagnetic docking with the use of a flexible wire and studied the dynamic response of the capture system and its effects on the impacted spacecraft with reduced gravity.
Mechanisms of stripe formation in vibrated granular materials
The Fall of Fame team is composed of four bachelor degree students from the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany. They have investigated whether stripe formation of Amaranth grains is inhibited under reduced gravity when the normal force between particles and ground and thus friction goes to zero.
Granular Anisotropic Gases in Drop Tower Experiments
The GAGa DropT team is composed of three PhD students studying at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg (Germany). They have investigated the behaviour of granular anisotropic gases in microgravity.
Chemical signalling in roots under microgravity conditions
The Falling Roots team comprises two students from the University of Florence, Italy, who were selected to develop and perform a microgravity experiment during ESA's Drop your Thesis! 2011 campaign. Their experiment is a continuation of their investigation into how biological processes are affected by microgravity and hypergravity.
Bubble Jet Impingement in Microgravity Conditions
The BubJet team is made up of three students from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). They have developed an experimental setup to investigate the collision of bubble jets in microgravity conditions. The experiment has been carried out in October 2010 at the ZARM drop tower in Bremen, Germany.
New PDLC materials obtained from dispersion of liquid crystal under microgravity conditions
The Physics Addicted team of four students from the Physics Department of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Porto (FCUP). They have used the ZARM drop tower in Bremen, Germany, in 2009 to successfully conduct an experiment to study polymerisation of different types of Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystals (PDLCs) under microgravity conditions. The polymerisation was achieved by using ultraviolet (UV) illumination.
