It is officially UNL's Spring Break, and Nick and I are still spending time in the lab. Today we did some structural tests on our steel frame. This was required by the safety officials at JSC, because in the past they have had welds crack. Thankfully, we got some help from the guys in the Civil Engineering Lab and worked out an effective, if not scary looking, test. We set the frame up on one end, slightly elevated by a few steel blocks on the floor, and strapped the top portion of the frame to a concrete pillar. Then, we hung a substantial amount of weight from specific locations to simulate the loads the frame could see in 9G's (under extreme emergency-only conditions during the flight). Here are some pictures of the set up.

This is the frame after being strapped to the pillar before we began handing weights from it. It doesn't even look scared.


The next few pictures are of the frame with all the weights hanging from it. The frame didn't break a sweat, and the welds held up without any problems, just like we had expected.






























Then we threw all the weights on the scale, 808 lb.


















It certainly looks scary, and I was a little afraid of dropping a weight on my foot. But, it's one more thing to check off the list. Next up is figuring out how to measure the vibrations in the hopper during the flight.