Posted on July 15: McMaster student helps send mail to space

McMaster student Michael Kinsner is helping develop a relatively inexpensive means of mailing material back to Earth from the international space station.

The fourth-year computer engineering and management student is working with an international scientific team in France, conducting experiments in weightless conditions in an aircraft over France and Belgium — the so-called “vomit comet” used in astronaut training.

The team, led by Kinsner's dad and McMaster alumnus Witold Kinsner '74 (University of Manitoba director of research), includes University of Manitoba master's students Neil Gadhok and Stephen Dueck.

The students left for France this past weekend, where they will experience up to 30 episodes each trip of weightless conditions lasting about 30 seconds. The aircraft flies a lengthy parabolic trajectory that's been likened to a roller coaster, producing brief weightless conditions.

The first trip is solely to get used to being weightless. On the second trip, they'll work in short bursts of weightless conditions to gather data with a prototype of a “space mail” system that the European Space Agency may try out in orbit by 2006. The point is to return research materials from the space station to Earth at a fraction of the cost of a $100-million (U.S.) shuttle mission.

The European agency is devising a container that can carry up to 10 kg of material back to Earth, guided from the space station by a 35-km thin string tether, and released at the precise moment that will allow it to re-enter the atmosphere and land by parachute in Europe.

“At tens of thousands of dollars a gram, weight is a key” when getting material into space and sending it back down again, said Michael Kinsner.

To read the complete Winnipeg Free Press story in the Fort Frances Times, click here.