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http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2010/06/portland_state_university_drop.html

"Oh, I hope this works," says Professor Mark Weislogel, as he and visitors watch a silver rectangle box the size of a small refrigerator rise slowly inside a metal-framed tower in the engineering building atrium.

Weislogel, a mechanical engineering professor at Portland State University, is orchestrating inaugural drops for the engineering college's new Dryden Drop Tower, a 102-foot tall metal framework used to create and study effects of weightlessness. Watching with him on Wednesday afternoon are visiting students and a group of PSU professors and administrators.

The metal box, which will hold experiments inside along with high speed video cameras to film them, stops at the third floor. During a drop, any objects in the box for a moment float nearly weightless.

A student pushes a button to release the box. It plunges in a flash to the basement, where magnets slow it to a soft landing. "It's designed for six drops an hour," Weislogel proudly tells students. The group includes some Tualatin High physics students who traveled to Cleveland this spring to see one of NASA's two drop towers. PSU's drop tower becomes the nation's third, though two other universities have mothballed their gravity busters.

PSU's tower is "very similar" to NASA's, but it is not as tall, and it has a different braking mechanism," observes Grant Gholston, 18, who just graduated from Tualatin High with plans to study engineering in college.

Philip Sloan, 17, who will be a senior next fall at Beaverton's Health and Science School, says the tower looks like it would be fun to build. "I prefer building stuff to using it," he says.

College officials, donors and community leaders gathered Wednesday evening in the atrium to watch Weislogel drop the box from the fifth floor with a birthday cake inside. Most of the candles went out.

He worked for NASA 10 years before coming to Portland State University in 2001. He has sent numerous experiments into space on NASA space shuttles to the International Space Station.

PSU's new drop tower will allow him to study weightlessness on Earth in brief increments.

"We get two seconds of low gravity time" during the box's plunge from the fifth-floor of the engineering building to the basement, the professor says. He soon will use the tower to study liquid drops, which grow larger and disperse differently in zero gravity. The aim is to help scientists in space better use and control liquids.

The tower offers PSU's Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science a "tremendous" teaching tool, said Renjeng Su, dean of the college. Students will be able to see how their predictions about the affects of zero gravity on objects hold up, he said.

The college designed its 5-year-old building with room in the atrium for a drop tower, though no one knew if, when or how the university would get one.

Supporters stepped up and raised funds for the tower in honor of Robert Dryden, the former dean who retired last year. The tower, lined with multi-color flashing fluorescent tubes, cost about $250,000, all of which was paid for by donors and in-kind contributions from various businesses, architects and engineering firms.

The tower is wired to operate remotely, says Weislogel.

"A full drop can be carried out by me in Germany and played over the web," he says.