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NASA's Weightless Wonder Aircraft
Posted on Mar 21, 2011 10:23:22 AM | John Entwistle | 1 Comments    |
When teaching the NES module, Exploring Space Through Math -- The Weightless Wonder, your students may be interested in some background information about NASA’s Weightless Wonder aircraft.

The aircraft is a C-9. NASA acquired the airplane from the U.S. Navy on August 9, 2003, from Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state. The C-9 is the military version of the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 used for many years by the commercial airlines. The U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force have used the C-9 aircraft to support passenger transportation, medical evacuation and special missions.

The primary mission of the NASA C-9 is to provide NASA and government microgravity researchers the platform to perform their research in a reduced-gravity environment. The aircraft also is used for Heavy Aircraft Training for astronaut pilots; to support the movement of the shuttle from landing sites in California and New Mexico back to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida; Trans-Atlantic Landing support; and the Emergency Mission Control Move mission.

“Born” on Date: Jan. 15, 1970
First Owner: KLM Airlines
U.S. Navy: July 8, 1989 - Aug.9, 2003
Total Time on Aircraft: 53,064.3 hours
Total Number of Landings: 45,882


Tags : NASA Point of Interest, NES Lesson-Weightless Wonder  

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1 Comments so far ( Post your own )
1 On Mar 21, 2011 11:59:44 PM  jeri hallberg harmon  added a comment on your blog post. 

I am a home school teacher and I also have the honor of facilitating a STEM after school program with the Housing authority of the City of El Paso.
We look foward to our upcoming visit to the NASA training facility.
We have a number of enthusiastic participants ages 4- early middle school.

Thank you for this information. We are new to NES and look foward to presenting the program and it's contents to our young people.
Respectfully,
Jeri

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