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Saturday Morning Science
Oct. 9th, 2010 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melannenTo 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:
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:
