Waves in a Large Free Sphere of Water
 

Waves in a Large Free Sphere of Water - An experiment at the International Space Station.



damn my head hurts.. but that shit is cool.

Cool to watch, but I'm not really sure why any money need to be spent on this. I hope that it wasn't the whole point of his trip. The sphere wasn't free, it was 'tethered'. Also, wouldn't a large free sphere of water in a space station be a bit of a liability?

My question is: How in the world do you make a free sphere of water? Does gravity and the laws of physics not apply in the NASA institute?

It looks like it is sitting in a wire holder, similar to the egg holder in an egg coloring kit.

yes, there is liability because of Newtonian law for every action force, there is a corresponding reaction force which is equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. If it was truly free it would have been pushed out of the camera view immediately.

What I believe they mean by "free" is that it is not in any container.

As far as why it is important to have spent money on this? I'm not sure, but I could easily see from this clip alone that the small scale replica of how the body mass reacted to such forces is a smaller scale planetary reaction to outside forces.

Nope.

Actually, this was done in space.

it's just physics..................wow!!!

xoxoxoo

That's kind of awesome.

Small experiments done in space that seem inconsequential can actually reveal quite a bit about the world. I remember seeing a clip similar to this one on television dealing with small particles and how they act in a zero-g environment. It showed that particles in space don't just float around, but that they clump together very quickly. This gave scientists quite a bit of insight into how the solar system was formed from a free floating gas/particle cloud.

Cool... but couldn't they have found a different narrator? Holy painful to listen to Batman!

Yup, not only do small experiments tell us a lot more than one may think, they're also really cheap to do a lot of times. On any given space mission, they do dozens of experiments. Some are small and seemingly inconsequential, like this one, while others are far more substantial.