After more than 50 years of human progress in space, the way things behave in microgravity is now clear to us.
But we are not always sure how space affects certain things. Like fire. Or schematic worm. Or even plants. Only by doing those experiments can we learn the answers to these burning questions.
This has led to some beautiful, sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes straightforward crazy experiments conducted in space.
A spacesuit goes beyond the story of Errol
The video above looks at something from a dream. A spacesuit floats away from the International Space Station ISS, without space, before the vast black void of space.
You may be relieved to know that no men were injured in the experiment – no one in the Russian Orlan spacesuit, nicknamed Ivan Ivanovich or Mr. Smith – is packed with old clothes and a radio transmitter.
The idea was that older spacesuits could be used as satellites. SweetSet-1 – Officially designated AMSAT-OSCAR 54 – was deployed on February 3, 2006, but the experiment was only partially successful; Reports change, NASA claimed that the transmitter died shortly after the broadcast and Russia reported the final transition a full fortnight later. The last confirmed signal was received on 18 February.
Suitset-1 spent several months in silent orbit before entering Earth’s atmosphere and burning out on September 7, 2006.
Hammer and feathers
In the late 16th century, Galileo Galilei left two areas of unequal mass from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy. When the two reached the ground at the same time, he was confronted with classically established opinions, the mass having no influence on gravitational acceleration. All objects, even if they are not mass, should fall at the same rate – even if they are feathers and hammers.
On Earth, it is difficult to demonstrate due to air resistance. But about 400 years later, a man on Bhela on the moon repeated the experiment.
On August 2, 1971, Apollo 15 commander David Scott took a hammer in one hand and a Falcon feather in the other. He raised them to a height of about 1.6 meters from the ground, and laid them down. Because the astronaut was essentially in a vacuum, the two objects came into harmony without air resistance.
NASA astronaut Joe Allen wrote that “in the accuracy of simultaneous release, objects were observed to strike at the same acceleration and simultaneously on the surface of the moon,” the result predicted by well-established theory, but the result nevertheless reassured consideration. Both the number of spectators who witnessed the experiment and the fact that the trip home was specifically based on the belief that the theory was being tested. “
Both the hammer and the feather are still there.
Fiji tablet in a water bubble
In microgravity, if you squirt a little water from a nozzle, it just stops there, all blobbing and wandering.
This is a lot of fun. Experiments and demonstrations include the inverted comet (the plane that makes free-fall parabolic flights for short periods of time) and the ISS, combining a piece of water with a giant bubble inside the speaker to observe the vibrations, balping water balloons, and filming it from the inside. To do this, place a GoPro camera in a water blob (you need stereoscopic 3D glasses for that).
In 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly painted water flowers with food coloring, then inserted inhaler pills, watching them melt and release gases into the water. It was filmed using the space station’s new 4K camera, so you can see the whole alien-algae-spawning … object in bright crisp resolution.
Fire in space
(ESA / NASA)
Just as water behaves differently in microgravity, so does fire. The 1997 Mir spacecraft fire is the only incident so far, but how the fire behaves in microgravity could help plan fire safety for future long-term missions such as crew missions to Mars and a permanent moon. Foundation. It can also help report fire safety protocols here on Earth.
To that end, numerous ongoing research projects have studied what happens to flames in space. The burning and suppression of solid experiments on the ISS has investigated the burning and extinction characteristics of a wide variety of fuels in microgravity. The data from these experiments can be used to create more complex models to understand the excellent details of combustion in the Earth’s gravity.
Riding in the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, scientists investigated how flares behave in different spacecraft conditions in sapphire experiments. And NASA’s Flame design investigation – part of advanced combustion through microgravity experiments – is exploring the production and control of suits.
It’s all very useful and interesting, sure. But it’s also pretty, and we bet there are some astronauts playing with fire in space with full explosions.
Space spiders
In 2011, scientists set out to answer the burning question: Can spiders adapt to space travel? They sent two golden silk orb-weaver spiders (Triconephila clevips), Esmeralda and Gladys, for a 45-day voyage on the ISS.
They were housed in a nice habitat (you can imagine spiders loose on a space station), with light conditions to control the night-day cycle, temperature and humidity, and a healthy diet of juicy fruit flies.
Both spiders adapted beautifully, continuing to spin their nets and hunting their food. Orb weavers eat their purple at the end of each day to regain protein, and spin again in the morning; This, too, the spiders continued to do exactly on schedule, which was interesting, as the various orb weaver species on the ISS just spin their nets at any old time of day.
But not everything was quite normal. In microgravity, spiders make their webs agile and round in different spins, compared to more three-dimensional, asymmetrical structures rotating-weaving around the earth.
Both spiders returned to Earth at the end of their stay in space. Esmeralda died on the return journey, living a normal spider lifetime. Gladys returned home, but he became a boy. It was named Gladstone.
The tortoise goes around the moon
In the 1960s, before humans went to the moon, it wasn’t exactly clear – if at all – that getting closer to the moon and becoming individual would have a physical effect on us. So, in 1968, two Russian tortoises (Agrionimis horsefieldi) were sent on a space trip to the Soviet space program.
Really, it wasn’t just a tortoise. The flight included wine flies, meltworms, seeds, plants, algae and bacteria. There was also a dummy equipped with a radiation sensor, as any living thing that lived in the morning was not the same for humans. Turtles, according to a 1969 report, seem to have been chosen because they are relatively easy to come down.
Two anonymous reptile cosmonauts were placed on the Zond-5 spacecraft on September 2, 1968, at which point they were no longer bored. They were launched into space on 15 September 1968, returning to Earth (in the Indian Ocean) on 21 September. They finally returned to Moscow in October.
Their voyage includes a seven-day spaceflight, several days in tropical weather (including bobbing at sea while waiting to recover rie) and transport back to Russia. Eventually, they spent 39 days without food. It will try anyone.
The control turtles on Earth were also deprived of food for the same period. A comparison of the two sets of tortoises revealed that any changes in space-flying reptiles were largely the result of starvation, with small contributions to spaceflight-related atrophy.
We want to say that no one ever sent a tortoise back into space, but unfortunately, two more tortoise missions took place. Carrying a tortoise in Flag 7 in 1969. In 1975, a tortoise was captured in the Soyuz 20 spacecraft for about 90 days. And in 1976, two tortoises flew over the Saliot-5 space station.
Moon trees
Just as we once did not know how space would affect animals, so we were unaware of the effects on plants. So when the Apollo 14 mission began on January 31, 1971, there was something in its cargo that we could now consider a little strange: about 500 seeds.
U.S. Scientists at the Forest Service want to know if tree seeds that have flown in microgravity and have been exposed to space radiation will germinate, grow, and look like seeds that have not left the earth.
The canister consisted of five species of tree: Lobloli pine (Pinus Tada), California Redwood (Sequoia sampreverance), American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga Menzizii), And American Sweet Gum (Liquidambursti recipiflua). They were with command module pilot Stuart Rousseau on 34 orbits of the moon before returning to Earth.
The seeds were then planted and tended, and most of those plants survived growing in seedlings, with the restraints that never left the earth. To our surprise now, there was no clear difference between the two.
By 1975, lunar trees, as they became known, were too large to be transplanted, and they were shipped across America. According to NASA’s website, less than 100 lunar trees can be counted today, and of those, only 57 survived when the page was placed together.
That means potentially hundreds of lunar trees in the U.S. May be hidden in, the lost relics of the time when our curiosity sent the little chick shining around the space. And we think it’s beautiful.
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