Cynthetiq

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



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

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Hektore

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?

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Jetée

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?

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Cynthetiq

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.

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Carno

Nope.

Actually, this was done in space.

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bobby

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

xoxoxoo

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hiredgun

That's kind of awesome.

MageB420666

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.

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Swirlie

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

SecretMethod70

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.

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