UNB researcher receives NBIF award

By Chris Morris – The Telegraph-Journal

FREDERICTON – Most people don’t pay much attention to the effects of high-velocity impacts until a bird strike brings down an airliner, or a piece of space debris the size of a frozen pea knocks out a satellite.

But for John Spray, director of the Planetary and Space Science Centre at the University of New Brunswick, high-speed impacts and their effect on life, structures and planetary bodies are the focus of his unique research.

Spray, one of this year’s recipients of the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s R3 Award for Excellence in Applied Research, is developing a leading-edge facility in Fredericton to test and ultimately design impact-resistant materials that could be used on everything from aircraft and military vehicles to homes in tornado-prone areas.

As well, because he is one of the few experts in the world on craters, he soon will be heading to California as a co-investigator on NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Mission that launched from Cape Canaveral in December, 2011.

The Mars rover is due to land in August in a complex, automatic procedure involving a sky crane that has scientists like Spray keeping their fingers tightly crossed.

“I want to get to use the rover, but the delivery system is very scary,” he says in an interview at the impact laboratory.

The moon and Mars are truly heavenly bodies for a crater enthusiast like Spray.

Earth, which is still geologically active, has only 182 craters. Almost two-thirds of the Martian surface is heavily cratered.

“We study the innards and the guts of impact craters to try and work out what happens to materials when they hit very hard because they don’t behave normally,” Spray says.

“Not only do they fragment into tiny pieces – like dropping a piece of china on the floor – they can also melt and vaporize and turn into rock steam. The energy is so huge when that collision happens because the projectiles are going tens of kilometres per second.”

It was Spray’s long years of academic work on craters that led him to develop an impact laboratory where he could put that research and knowledge to practical use.

“If you build a facility, you can experimentally recreate impacts using different types of launch technology – specialized guns,” he says.

“So my goal was to apply that academic knowledge ultimately to develop new, tough, impact-resistant materials.”

There are two “guns” in Spray’s laboratory – both very large pieces of equipment that take up a lot of space.

The FOD – foreign object damage gun – is being used in a project with Bombardier to test high-velocity impacts, including bird strikes, on aircraft.

Ironically, the FOD was constructed to handle a scenario involving a male Canada goose weighing about eight kilograms. It wasn’t too long after drawing up those specifications that an airbus taking off in New York City ran into a flock of Canada geese, lost both engines and ended up landing on the Hudson River.

Everyone on the plane survived.

“That wasn’t a miracle, and it annoys me when people say it was,” Spray says.

“It was good engineering and a very good pilot. That’s what got the aircraft down – nothing else.”

In another room in the laboratory, the larger, light gas gun – about the length of a city bus – can fire objects at speeds from tens of metres per second to as fast as eight kilometres per second.

It can also recreate the vacuum of space.

“Satellites have been taken out by orbital debris,” Spray says. “One tiny piece no bigger than a frozen pea can take one out. So you have to design ways of defeating that. Our equipment allows us to test shielding technology under realistic conditions.”

Phase one of the innovative impact laboratory involves developing and staffing the actual facility and then learning the trade, or art, through practice. There is no manual, Spray says of the work.

“Phase two, which will probably start in 2013-14, is using this facility to develop new impact-resistant materials for the benefit of humans and infrastructure.”

The Innovation Foundation award will be presented to Spray at a gala in Fredericton on Wednesday.

Two other researchers are also receiving R3 awards: Jacques Gagnon, science director at the Coastal Zones Research Institute in Shippagan, and Pandurang Ashrit, director of the Université de Moncton’s Thin Films Research Group.