Students of the Master Earth Sciences of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) won the European parabolic flight contest of the European Space Agency (ESA). As a result their experiments of the water repellency of soils will be carried out during a European scientific parabolic flight campaign. The project is one of only four selected in this European competition and was commended by the committee for its high quality.

Master students Sebastiaan de Vet and Lieke Mulder will carry out their experiments on board of a specially designed Airbus airplane. Over a three day period they will make 90 parabolic flights. In the short period of weightlessness during the flight, the students plan to study the interactions between soil particles. They aim to find out if the water repellency of the soil is the result of a reversal of the water repellant coating of sand grains. When soils become water repellant the effects for the environment can be significant. As a result of water repellency, water is no longer able to infiltrate the soil which can lead to erosion of the fertile topsoil and devastating mud flows. With their experiments with weightless sand, Sebastiaan and Lieke hope to gain new insights into the effects of forest fires and desertification on the water repellency of soils. Their project forms an integral part of the research in this area that is carried out by the Earth Surface Sciences Research Group of the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) of the UvA. 

The flight campaign is planned to be carried out in the first quarter of 2011. The students will spend 2010 preparing and building the experiment. This is not the first time Sebastiaan de Vet uses parabolic flights in his MSc studies. In September 2009 he used 33 parabolic flights above the North Sea to study the formation of avalanches on the planet Mars (more information through the link below).