NEWS RELEASE

Communications and Marketing Office
600 S. Clyde Morris Blvd.
Daytona Beach, FL 32114-3900

For more information, contact:
Phone: 386-226-6157
Fax: 386-226-6158
Contact: Mary Van Buren
Phone: 386-226-6525

Joint Team to Conduct Fuel-Slosh Experiment in NASA’s FAST Program

Daytona Beach, Fla., Sept. 8, 2010 -- Members of a joint team from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Orbital Sciences Corp., and United Launch Alliance will get the chance to test a fuel-slosh experiment in weightlessness thanks to NASA’s Facilitated Access to the Space Environment for Technology (FAST) program.

The annual program allows U.S. companies, universities, and governmental agencies to assess emerging technologies of their own design onboard a specially modified Boeing 727 aircraft that performs parabolic trajectories simulating the reduced gravity of the moon and Mars. This year, 17 teams from across the nation will gather at Ellington Field in Houston, Texas, from Sept. 24 to Oct. 1 to receive astronaut flight training and conduct their experiments.

Other schools whose teams were chosen include California State Polytechnic University, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Purdue University, and Stanford University.

When selecting the teams each year, NASA favors research proposals that have potential value for its flight programs and other commercial aerospace applications. The prediction of liquid behavior in spacecraft fuel tanks is of critical importance because the dynamic motion of liquid propellant and its interaction with the solid body of a spinning spacecraft can destabilize the spacecraft, an undesirable and expensive problem.

The Embry-Riddle members of the team are Dr. Sathya Gangadharan, mechanical engineering professor; Dillon Sances, mechanical engineering graduate student; and Nathan Silvernail, aerospace engineering undergraduate student, all from the Daytona Beach campus. The other members are James Sudermann and Brandon Marsell of NASA; Bernard Kutter of United Launch Alliance; and Keith Schlee of Orbital Sciences Corp.

“The selection of our joint team for the FAST program is welcome recognition of the significance of Embry-Riddle’s ongoing research and testing in the area of spacecraft propellant slosh,” said Dr. Gangadharan. “This current experiment is a continuation of ones conducted by Dillon and Nathan in NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program (RGSFOP), which is similar to NASA’s FAST program. It’s been a rewarding experience to advise our microgravity student teams over the years, and I look forward to joining Dillon and Nathan for my first-ever flight in weightlessness.”

The Daytona Beach students conducted their most recent fuel-slosh experiment in NASA’s RGSFOP this past June; a student team from the University’s Prescott, Ariz., campus was also selected for that session, during which they studied the effect of torque, or twisting force, on the movement of a microsatellite.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the world's largest, fully accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace, offers more than 30 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in its colleges of Arts and Sciences, Aviation, Business, and Engineering. Embry-Riddle educates more than 34,000 students annually at residential campuses in Daytona Beach, Fla., and Prescott, Ariz., through the Worldwide Campus at more than 150 campuses in the United States, Europe, Asia, Canada, and the Middle East, and through online learning. For more information, visit www.embryriddle.edu.