common_nature | Saturday Morning Science

To prove that you can post things other than photos of plants here, have some Saturday Morning Science!

On the International Space Station, American astronauts have Saturday mornings off from the serious science they do the rest of the time. Officer Don Pettit decided to spend his Saturday mornings doing non-serious science: the sort of kitchen-table science using soap and jello and alka-seltzer and dirty towels and things that most people grow out of in grade school (but none of us here ever did, right?) Only IN SPACE.

He ended up discovering some amazing and beautiful things about microgravity physics - and in fact some of his zero-budget experiments ended up being more important than the hundred-thousand-dollar official ones. Many of them involved the surface tension of liquids in freefall. In other words, blowing bubbles! He took videos of most of the experiments, and they're all up on youtube; you can find most of them by searching "Saturday Morning Science". Here's one of my favorites:

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

stellar_dust

OMG SO COOL.

weaverbird

Wow. That is SO COOL.

frith

From looking at the water droplet filled with mica-flakes, I think the gyroscopic action conveyed by the rotation of the droplet is what causes the droplet to end up following the curve of the air pocket instead of continuing to bounce around. Also, mass transfer seems to be a function of the speed of the droplet as it skims the curve of the air pocket.

melannen

It seems intuitively like mass transfer is a function of speed - I think because we intuitively have experience of non-newtonian fluids which would behave that way - but it seems like it would be pretty revolutionary to find the surface tension of water being non-Newtonian. (But then I suck at fluid dynamics.) I don't remember what they finally decided; I suppose I should re-watch the rest of the videos.

Later on in the video series they discover that a portable CD player, in space, functions as a gyroscopic stabilization platform! And start duct-taping their tools to them! And everybody goes, duh, why didn't we think of that first?

LOL at the CD player gyroscope! If the CD player can read MP3 files, it can run continuously for eight and a half hours between 'repeat' induced wobbles! I assume there would be a wobble during the time it takes the CD player to return to the first track.

beetlethree

What a fun way to play with science! Also I spent my Saturday morning slothfully browsing the internet and these guys played with bubbles in space. huh

You could always spend your Saturday mornings playing with bubbles anyway! Apparently they brought the 1911 book Soap Bubbles and the Forces Which Mould Them up to the station with them and got most of their ideas from it. It's out of copyright and available from Project Gutenberg...