Greensboro Day SchoolHooke’s Law Orbital Motion

Reduced-Gravity Flight Experiment

Jeff RegesterPhysics

Jason CheekMathematics

Tim MartinEarth Science

Chris BernhardtChemistry

Melinda GrahamMathematics

Eric ShillingMathematics

Hooke’s Lawdescribes the force exerted by a spring

F=k·xF = forcex = stretch of the

springk = spring constant

Normal orbits caused by gravity lead to elliptical orbits. If gravity is replaced by a spring, what will the orbits look like?

stiffer springs have bigger k’s

Hooke’s Law OrbitsTwo masses, connected by a spring, are set spinning by a turntable apparatus. HYPOTHESIS: When released in 0g, the masses will oscillate in and out as they also orbit the system center of mass.

Detailed numerical model predictions are to be compared with high-speed video footage.

Construction & Testing

Ellington Field

Fiona, our wonderful NASA mentor!

glovebox modifications

Test Readiness Review (TRR) Day One

Flight!

Flight ground track A video frame. Video was shot at 300 frames per second.

Twenty-six successful runs, testing a variety of parameters (spring constant, masses, initial RPM and axis location) were completed.

Flight 2 Run 16

Numerical model prediction

For more info...Go to the HLOM project website for

– photos and video– raw and analyzed data– numerical models– articles, papers and classroom activities as

they are writtenhttp://academic.greensboroday.org/~regesterj/data/rgo-HLOM/

MANY THANKS TO: Fiona Turett, our NASA/JSC mentor, Flavio Mendez & Marie Wiggins at NSTA the RGO and TFS teams at NASA, and GDS for the financial support!