FLIGHT MECHANICS EXPERIMENT ONBOARD NASA’S ZERO GRAVITY AIRCRAFT

Flight mechanics of a tailless articulated wing aircraft.

This paper investigates the flight mechanics of a micro aerial vehicle without a vertical tail in an effort to reverse-engineer the agility of avian flight. The key to stability and control of such a tailless aircraft lies in the ability to control the incidence angles and dihedral angles of both wings independently. The dihedral angles can be varied symmetrically on both wings to control aircr...

Rat head direction cell responses in zero-gravity parabolic flight.

Astronauts working in zero-gravity (0-G) often experience visual reorientation illusions (VRIs). For example, when floating upside down, they commonly misperceive the spacecraft floor as a ceiling and have a reversed sense of direction. Previous studies have identified a population of neurons in the rat's brain that discharge as a function of the rat's head direction (HD) in a gravitationally h...

The Effects of Coriolis Acceleration during Zero-gravity Parabolic Flight.

Twenty-one normal and four labyrinthine defective (L-D) subjects were exposed to repetitive, twenty-second intervals of (1) zero gravity or (2) zero gravity plus Coriolis acceleration in parabolic flight. The normal subjeets showed significant hematological and biochemieaI evidence of stress in the form of leukoeytic changes and alteration in excretion rates of eorticosteroids, while the L-D gr...

Steady Aircraft Flight and Aircraft Performance

Aircraft Longitudinal Control Experiment

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and analysis of an experiment that demonstrates the stability and control system characteristics of an aircraft constrained at the center of gravity in an air flow field. Given a set of basic requirements, the physical system (including the airframe, wings, tail, and mounted ball bearing) was designed, modeled, and manufactured. With the aircraft pl...