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VORTEX is Home!

NASA removed VORTEX from Endeavour's payload bay and shipped it to Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Sven Bilen, Dan Kocevski, and John Korsakas made the trip to pick up VORTEX.

Click here for pictures from the de-integration.

Apparently sometime during the mission, a single event upset occurred, and zapped VORTEX's computer. After returning to Michigan, we connected the hard drives to another computer, and found 100 experiments of data! Some of it will be up here soon.

Reflight:

Due to NASA technical difficulties on STS-89, the VOrtex Ring Transit EXperiment flew in space again! STS-88 Endeavour is carried VORTEX on the first United States Inernational Space Station construction mission that launched on December 4, 1998, at 3:35:34am EST and landed on December 15, 1998 at 10:53pm EST. Click Here for NASA's Shuttle Countdown Online page.

VORTEX Team members were at Kennedy Space Center to see the launch, click here for pictures of the launch.

In August 1998, students delivered VORTEX to NASA personnel at Kennedy Space Center for payload integration. Click here for more information.

Get Away Special (GAS) payload G-093, also called VORTEX (VOrtex Ring Transit EXperiment), is an investigation of the propagation of a vortex ring through a liquid-gas interface in microgravity. This process results in the formation of one or more liquid droplets similar to earth based liquid atomization systems. In the absence of gravity, surface tension effects dominate the droplet formation process. The space shuttle's microgravity environment allows the study of the same fluid atomization processes using a larger droplet size than is possible on Earth. This enables detailed experimental studies of the complex flow processes encountered in liquid atomization systems. With VORTEX, deformations in both the vortex ring and the fluid surface will be measured closely for the first time in a parameters range that accurately resembles liquid atomization.

Interaction of a vortex ring with a fluid interface in simulated microgravity conditions

The physics of liquid break-up and droplet formation by a vortex ring flow in microgravity is a fundamental problem with application to manufacturing and systems development in space. It is also important in many Earth-based engineering systems. For example, fuel atomization is an important aspect of the design and operation of internal combustion engines. Another example is inert gas atomization used in powder metallurgy to produce metal powders of desired characteristics. Medical and biological applications are in the manufacturing of encapsulated drops of complex structure for drug delivery.

The Get Away Special (GAS) Program was designed by NASA to provide a cheap way for educational institutions to place a payload on the space shuttle. The program allows educational institutions to develop a payload that is under 200 lb. and fits in the NASA manufactured 5.0 cubic ft GAS canister. The cost that the institution must incur is a $10,000 fee to fly the payload, the cost of transporting the payload to Kennedy Space Center, and the cost of designing and building the payload. The institution may perform their experiment on any educational/scientific topic as long as they pass certain safety reviews setup by NASA. The GAS program is an excellent opportunity for kindergarten through college students; however, it has been the UMSEDS/VORTEX team's experience that the limited instructions and documentation provided do not give enough information for young inexperienced GAS payload developers.

VORTEX relied heavily on other academic institutions' experiences in developing their payloads. The VORTEX team was able to learn from mistakes and achievements of other teams for the development of their own experiment by keeping open communication channels between current and previous experimenters. VORTEX would like to continue this tradition through this web page and allow other teams to quickly access and learn about the VORTEX payload.

G-093 is being developed by the University of Michigan Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. The purpose of this experiment is to give college level students hands-on experience in an engineering and design environment, while gaining knowledge in the area of surface-tension-dominated interface dynamics.