THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 13, 1997 TAG: 9702130312
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By DENISE WATSON, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 68 lines
Would less gravity make oil and water mix better? Does space hold the secret to a better salad dressing?
Well, students in NORSTAR - Norfolk public schools' Science and Technology for Advanced Research program - still aren't sure.
The students' oil and water experiment was one of 10 from across the country included in the payload of the space shuttle Columbia for its mission in November.
An electrical glitch prevented the experiment from working as planned, but the students haven't been too disappointed.
``Even though we didn't get what we were looking for, it was successful,'' said Christina Walker, a 17-year-old senior at Granby High School.
``We have data we can use, and it gives us incentive to do another experiment.''
The NORSTAR students developed the experiment more than a year ago to see what would happen when oil and water mixed in near-weightless conditions. Answers could be useful to the pharmaceutical and chemical industries, for such purposes as producing better lubricants.
Forty-four students worked on the project during their classes, after school and during the summer at the Norfolk Technical and Vocational Center. Some experimented with oil and water, cracking lava lamps for their oil and testing water with different salt levels to lower the water's freezing point.
Others worked on the construction of the compact experiment - a 15-by-7-inch metal base, consisting of a 12-volt mini-motor, a teflon-coated magnetic stirring bar, a magnet and a sealed acrylic block containing canola oil and distilled water. A 5-inch-long fluorescent light highlighted the mixture, and a mini-camcorder was included to tape results.
Astronauts aboard the shuttle activated the experiment, and the stirring bar was supposed to mix the oil and water for three minutes. The camcorder would record what happened as the mixture settled more than two hours.
But the motor was mistakenly programmed by students to run for 2 1/2 hours, instead of three minutes.
``When we got the videotape back and it just kept going, and going, and going. I thought, `Oh, my gosh!''' said NORSTAR teacher Joy Young.
``But we actually got a result. This is not a failure of an experiment, just a different experiment.''
The videotape showed that the bubbles forming in the mixture were more consistent in size than those that form on earth. Also, the vortex made by the mixing motion took more energy to form in space.
``We observed a vortex at 12 volts here, but in space it took 15 volts,'' explained Nicole Smith, a sophomore at Norview High School.
``We still don't know why, but we hope to get help and find out.''
NORSTAR was among seven student groups nationally, ranging from kindergarten to university-level, chosen by NASA to participate in a new education initiative to make space more accessible to school children.
This is the second time a NASA space shuttle has flown a NORSTAR project; in September 1994, the shuttle Discovery carried an experiment to record the behavior of sound waves in zero gravity.
Young said NASA has given them the OK to include a better-programmed version of their experiment on a September launch. They plan to submit proposals and get picked to send an experiment up at least every two years.
``Engineering is 97 percent of this. Most of the time something fails to work, and ours didn't fail to work,'' Young said.
``We'll know what to do the next time around.'' ILLUSTRATION: MARK MITCHELL
The Virginian-Pilot
Students of Science and Technology for Advanced Research, from left,
J.R. Gibson, Christina Walker, Ryan Feber, Nicole Smith and Jeff
Herring, sent their experiment to space.