The way things behave in microgravity may seem obvious to us now, after humans have been venturing into space for more than 50 years.
But we haven’t always been sure how space can affect certain things. Like fire. Or planar worms. Or even plants. Only by conducting experiments can we learn the answers to these burning questions.
This has led to some rather fascinating, sometimes annoying, and sometimes downright extravagant experiments conducted in space.
A space suit is made out of an air key
The video above plays like a nightmare. A space suit floats, unbound, away from the International Space Station’s ISS), the immense black void of space yawning in front of it.
You may be relieved to learn that there was no human damage in conducting this experiment (there is no one in the Russian space suit Orlan, nicknamed Ivan Ivanovich or Mr. Smith), which is full of piles. of old clothes and a radio transmitter.
The idea was that ancient space suits could be used as satellites. SuitSat-1 – officially designated AMSAT-OSCAR 54 – was deployed on February 3, 2006, but the experiment was only partially successful; reports vary, NASA claims the transmitter died shortly after launch and Russia reported a final transmission a fortnight later. The last confirmed signal was received on February 18th.
SuitSat-1 spent several months in silent orbit, before entering Earth’s atmosphere and burning on September 7, 2006.
The hammer and the pen
In the late 16th century, Galileo Galilei dropped two spheres of unequal mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. When they both landed at the same time, he had countered classical views, showing that the mass had no influence on gravitational acceleration. All objects, regardless of mass, should fall at the same rate, even if it is a pen and a hammer.
On Earth, this is difficult to prove due to air resistance. But almost 400 years later, a human on the moon repeated the experiment.
On August 2, 1971, Apollo 15 Commander David Scott grabbed a geological hammer in one hand and a hawk feather in the other. He lifted them to a height of about 1.6 meters from the ground and dropped them. Because the astronaut was essentially in a vacuum, with no air resistance, the two objects fell in sync.
“Within the accuracy of simultaneous release, it was observed that objects were experiencing the same acceleration and simultaneously impacting the lunar surface,” wrote NASA astronaut Joe Allen, “which was a result predicted by a well-established theory, but a reassuring result considering both the number of spectators who witnessed the experiment and the fact that the trip home was critically based on the validity of the theory in particular. is testing “.
The hammer and pen are still up there.
Gaseous tablet in a drop of water
In microgravity, if you take some water out of a nozzle, it just hangs there, all blurry and hesitant.
This can result in a lot of fun. Experiments and demonstrations have included saving water balloons to the vomiting comet (the plane that makes parabolic flights to create short periods of free fall) and to the ISS, fixing a water ball with a large bubble inside it. ‘a speaker to watch the vibrations, and put a GoPro camera in a drop of water to film it from the inside (you’ll want stereoscopic 3D glasses for that).
In 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly colored a drop of water with food coloring and then inserted effervescent tablets, watching them dissolve and release gases into the water. It was filmed with the space station’s new 4K camera, so you can see everything that alien algae generates … with a gloriously sharp resolution.
Fire in space
(ESA / NASA)
Just as water behaves differently in microgravity, so does fire. The 1997 Mir space station fire has fortunately been a one-time event so far, but figuring out how microgravity fire behaves can help plan fire safety for future long-term missions such as the manned mission to Mars and the permanent moon. base. It can also help inform fire safety protocols here on Earth.
To this end, several ongoing research projects have studied what happens to flames in space. Solid fuel combustion and suppression experiments aboard the ISS have investigated the combustion and extinction characteristics of a wide range of microgravity fuel types. The data from these experiments can be used to construct more complex models to understand the finer details of combustion in Earth’s gravity.
Aboard the spacecraft Cygnus, the scientists investigated how the flames behave under different spacecraft conditions in the Saffire experiments. And NASA’s Flame Design research, which is part of Advanced Combustion via Microgravity Experiments, is exploring soot production and control.
All of this is very useful and interesting, for sure. But it’s also incredibly beautiful and we bet there are some astronauts who enjoy an absolute blast playing with fire in space.
Space spiders
In 2011, scientists began answering the burning question: Can spiders adapt to space travel? They sent two spiders of golden silk fabric (Trichonephila clavipes), Emerald and Gladys, to spend a 45-day stay aboard the ISS.
They were kept in a good habitat (you can imagine loose spiders in a space station), with light conditions to simulate a night cycle, temperature and humidity control, and a healthy diet of juicy fruit flies.
The two spiders adapted very well, continuing to spin their nets and hunt their food. Orb weavers eat their fabrics at the end of each day to retrieve proteins and spin them again in the morning; this, too, the spiders continued to do correctly at the scheduled time, which was interesting, as different species of ISS orb weavers had just turned their webs at any time of the day.
But not everything was completely normal. In microgravity, spiders rotated their webs differently: flatter and rounder, compared to the more asymmetrical, three-dimensional structures that orb weavers rotate on Earth.
The two spiders returned to Earth at the end of their stay in space. Emerald died on the return journey, having lived a normal life as a spider. Gladys returned home, but turned out to be a boy. The name Gladstone was changed.
Turtles orbit the Moon
As early as the 1960s, before humans had been on the Moon, it was not clear exactly how, if in any way, knowing the Moon up close would affect us physically. Thus, in 1968, the Soviet space program sent two Russian turtles (Agrionemys horsfieldii) to make a trip to Earth’s companion.
Actually, they weren’t just turtles. The flight included wine flies, flour worms, seeds, plants, algae and bacteria. There was also a mannequin equipped with radiation sensors, as none of the living organisms on board were remotely analogous to humans. According to a 1969 report, turtles appear to have been chosen because they are relatively easy to release.
The two unnamed reptilian cosmonauts were placed aboard the Zond-5 spacecraft on September 2, 1968, at which time they were no longer fed. They were launched into space on September 15, 1968, returning to Earth (in the Indian Ocean) on September 21. They finally returned to Moscow on October 7.
His trip included seven days of space flight, several days in tropical climates (including circling the ocean while waiting for recovery) and transportation back to Russia. Ultimately, they spent 39 days without food. I would try any.
The control turtles that remained on Earth were also deprived of food for the same period of time. A comparison of the two sets of turtles revealed that any changes in space reptiles were primarily the result of starvation, with a small contribution from space flight-related atrophy.
We would like to say that no one sent turtles back into space, but unfortunately two more turtle missions were carried out. Zond 7 in 1969 carried turtles. In 1975, the Soyuz 20 spacecraft carried a turtle for 90 days. And two turtles flew to the Salyut-5 space station in 1976.
Lunar trees
Just as we once did not know how space would affect animals, we were also unaware of its effects on plants. Thus, when the Apollo 14 mission was launched on January 31, 1971, its cargo contained something we might now consider somewhat peculiar: about 500 seeds.
Scientists from the U.S. Forest Service wanted to know if the seeds of trees that had flown in microgravity and had been subjected to space radiation would sprout, grow, and look the same as seeds that had never left Earth.
Five species of trees were included in the bottle: loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), California Sequoia (Sequoia sempervirens), American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), and American sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua). They accompanied pilot of the module Stuart Roosa to the 34 orbits of the Moon before returning to Earth.
The seeds were planted and cared for, and most survived to become seedlings, alongside controls that had never left Earth. Now it was surprising to us that there was no noticeable difference between the two.
By 1975, the lunar trees, as they were known, were large enough to be transplanted and shipped across America. According to this NASA website, less than 100 lunar trees can be counted today, and of these, only 57 lived when the page was assembled.
That means there could be hundreds of lunar trees hiding in the United States, a lost relic of a time when our curiosity sent small seeds flying through space. And we think it’s beautiful.