Eight UNF students have been selected to fly aboard NASA’s reduced gravity aircraft, nicknamed the “vomit comet.”

The aircraft allows passengers to experience around 15-30 seconds of zero gravity by flying in a parabola.

Only 19 teams are selected by NASA to participate, and schools across the nation submitted experiments to be considered.

The team will spend eight days at the Johnson Space Center in Texas. They will spend two of those days in the aircraft.

Chelsea Partridge, a mechanical engineering major at UNF, said they got all the funding they needed for their experiment through the School of Engineering.

“Overall, we’ll get about 60 parabolas with optimally about 30 seconds each,” said Partridge.

The groups experiment measures bone density in space. They are creating a cube sat, which is a small cube shaped satellite.

Partridge said they want to create a bioreactor that can study bone cell density and the effects microgravity and radiation have on bone cell density in space. Before they can do that, she said, they have to figure out how to regulate media.

“That’s what the experiment is going to do. It’s going to see how fluids flow at very low flow rates in zero gravity,” said Partridge. She said once they do that, they can apply it to the cube sat.

Students attending range in majors from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science.

Email Saphara Harrell at [email protected]