MG Lab - the flying mice...

SO. I haven't written for a while...sorry :)
....and i needed to write about the trip to Gifu... so here it is:

Lan and I stayed over at Seda's place (which is a *tiny* appartment 5mins walk from uni), while Seda made other sleeping arrangements... then got up at the ridiculous time of 430am to be in lab for 5am. nice eh? Anyway, we were at uni so early all the gates were shut... so we had to climb in. Which was fun.

So, we wonder in to lab a little bleary-eyed, to find Fukuda just waking up, after spending the night in the lab, do some last minute checks whilst eating breakfast. We eventually leave at 6am.

The hire car was fully loaded with all of Lan's equipment for the micro gravity tests, and sleeping people. Apart from the driver, obviously, and sometimes me. As we were driven by Kawano through the beautiful Japanese landscape; which was occasionally interrupted by the odd warning sign about falling bears and roaming rocks (could be the other way around); I attempted to stay awake and annoy Kawano...much to his surprise. Discovered that he can drive a huge variety of vehicles because he use to race and drive the large trucks which would transport the cars to the tracks. I couldn't really work out what he raced; I assume they were like drag cars, the Japan-English language barrier wasn't so helpful.

We stopped several times along the way, to stretch our legs and smoke the driver...I sat with Kawano and Fukuda whilst they chatted...and apparently it hadn't been such a bad day for 'understanding what the hell wayway is going on about'...Kawano said he could catch about '50%' of what I was blathering on about.

We eventually get to the micro gravity lab at about 12:30, unload all the equipment to get it to a preparation room, then head off to lunch at 'curry house' - it's a japanese version of curry...and it's not nice...I wouldn't recommend. Brown sludge with rice. MMmmmmmm no thanks! It's going to be a long day.

When we got back, Lan had to start preparing her experiment: testing sand under very low gravity. She was stressed....but we stayed until the lab was about to shut trying to set up what we could ready for preparation and testing tomorrow.

the control room

So we go to our hotel (very nice - but in the middle of nowhere) have a shower then go out to dinner, alcoholically funded by Yamada. We have to be up and out of the hotel by 830am the next day.

the capsule

I mainly spend my time, napping, trying to calm Lan down [the computer crashed - which made her scream], and taking photos... Anyway, the lab was very interesting; the bullet like capsule is dropped down a vertical shaft, 100m of free fall and 50m of braking via a rubber sock thing. All morning, whilst setting up, we watched sets of 4 rats, wearing little hats, being dropped for scientific purposes. Apparently, they were monitoring brain activity of said rats under free fall conditions. No idea why, but I guess it's fun. I was heavily dissapointed though, that I didn't get to see any rats flying in their little plastic cages, then looking heavily confused on being subjected to 12g's under the breaking force. The installed camera which transmitted throughout the test was sadly only aimed at the screen monitoring their brain activity. Below there is a photo of the capsule which had the flying rats...

the mice