GT Drop Tower Challenge

Drop towers are the most accessible and cost-effective microgravity research facility. By dropping an experiment inside a vacuum tube or a drag shield, free-fall conditions are generated that unveil a wide variety of fundamental physical phenomena. Drop towers can also be used to support the development spacecraft technologies before we send them to space. In this project, we will design, build, and test the very first drop tower at Georgia Tech in collaboration with some of the top experts in the field, joining the very few universities in the world that benefit from this kind of facility. A space systems engineering approach will be followed to design the tower. Starting from the scientific objectives, we will define a series of technical requirements and evaluate potential architectures. Several working groups will collaborate on the design following a concurrent engineering approach. Students will build the facility in one of the stairwells of the ESM building and test it using their own experiments.