It is officially 2014 and we have heard from NASA that the SpaceX-3 launch date has been set to March 1st! We have already begun shipping supplies to Kennedy Space Center in anticipation of the launch and now that we know the date, the race is on.
Our lab had a "mission patch" designed for our project:
We now have to finalize our experimental schedule, book flights and
lodging, etc before we leave for Florida. We will also continue to do
ground and simulated microgravity studies in the meantime. We just
completed an experiment using a desktop Random Positioning Machine
(RPM), which uses two frames to rotate an object on the platform such that its gravity vector averages to 0.
(Photo courtesy of Dutch Space)