Utah State University’s Get Away Special (GAS) team was awarded the opportunity to participate in Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities program administered by NASA. Six members of the GAS team will fly in a specialized jet which will simulate microgravity where the experiment can be performed in 30 second intervals. The purpose of the experiment is to determine the properties of nucleate boiling of water in weightlessness. The experiment will be monitored with temperature sensors, accelerometers, and high definition cameras and the results will be analyzed frame by frame. This will provide important information related to the dynamics of heat transfer using thin wire heating elements in microgravity. Under these controlled conditions, the boiling dynamics will be under specific scrutiny. Additionally, other observations related to varying power inputs and the effects of alternate surface geometries of the platinum wire will be made. The GAS team flies June 17-26, 2010 at Johnson Space Center, Houston, TX
