The way things behave in microgravity may seem obvious to us now, after humans have been in space for more than 50 years.
But we were never sure how a place would affect some things. As the fire. Or planarian worms. Or even plants. Only by experimenting can we learn the answers to these burning questions.
That has led to some very interesting, sometimes confusing, and sometimes brutal experiments that have taken place in space.
A space suit moves out an airlock
The video above plays out like something out of a nightmare. A space suit floats, unbound, away from the ISS International Space Station), the space of a huge black space that precedes.
You may be pleased to learn that no one was harmed in this test – no one in a Russian Orlan space suit, nicknamed Ivan Ivanovitch or Mr Smith – full of old clothes and a radio transmitter.
The idea was that old spaceuits could be used as satellites. SuitSat-1 – officially named AMSAT-OSCAR 54 – was used on February 3, 2006, but the test was only partially successful; There are various reports, with NASA saying that the transmitter died shortly after its release and Russia reports that the last release was made a fortnight later. The last confirmed signal was received on 18 February.
SuitSat-1 went on to spend several months in silent orbit, before entering Earth’s atmosphere and burning up on September 7, 2006.
The hammer and the feather
In the late 16th century, Galileo Galilei released two areas of unequal mass from the Lean Tower of Pisa in Italy. When the two of them reached the ground at the same time, it was against classically established views, showing that mass had little effect on the acceleration of gravity. Everything, no matter the mass, should fall at the same level – even if it is a feather and a hammer.
On Earth, this is difficult to prove because of air force. But nearly 400 years later, a man standing on the Moon did the test again.
On 2 August 1971, Commander David Scott of Apollo seized 15 geological hammers in one hand, and a hawk’s feather in the other. He lifted them to a height of about 1.6 meters off the ground, and dropped them. As the astronaut was largely in a vacuum, without the tension of the air the two fell into synchronization.
“Within the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to go under the same acceleration and hit the lunar surface at the same time,” wrote NASA astronaut Joe Allen, “who was the a result predicted by an established theory, but a nonetheless confident result considering both the number of viewers who saw the experiment and the fact that the trip home was critically based on the effectiveness of the particular theory which has been proven. “
The hammer and feather are still up there.
Funny record in a water blob
In microgravity, if you scrape some water out of a nose, it just hangs there, all blobby and wobbling.
This can cause a lot of fun. Tests and demonstrations have included pop water balloons in the comet vomit (the plane that makes parabolic trips to create short periods of collapse) and the ISS, connecting a water blob with bubbles large inside your speaker to see the vibrations, and put a GoPro camera in a water blob for filming from the inside (you’ll want stereoscopic 3D glasses for that one).
In 2015, astronaut Scott Kelly colored a food-colored water blob, then inserted hidden tablets, watching them melt and release gases into the water. Filmed using the space station’s new 4K camera, you can see all the alien-algae spawning … something in a glorious crouching resolution.
Space fire
(ESA / NASA)
Just as water behaves differently in microgravity, so will fire. The fire at the Mir space station in 1997 has been a special event so far, but working out how fire behaves in microgravity can help design for fire safety for future long-term missions such as the crew’s trip to Mars, and the permanent Moon. bonn. It can help to inform fire safety protocols down here on Earth, too.
To that end, several ongoing research projects have examined the fate of flames in space. Combustion and solids transfer tests aboard the ISS have investigated the combustion and extinction properties of a wide range of fuel types in microgravity. Data from these experiments can be used to build more complex models to understand the optimal details of fuel in Earth gravity.
On board the Cygnus cargo spacecraft, scientists studied how flames behave under different spacecraft conditions in Saffire experiments. And NASA’s Flame Design study – part of the Advanced Combination Study through Microgravity Experiments – is studying soot production and control.
This is all very useful and interesting, for sure. But it’s also pretty cowardly, and we’ll bet some astronauts get a full blast playing with fire in space.
Space spiders
In 2011, scientists began answering the burning question: Can spiders accept space travel? They sent two golden silk orb weaver spiders (Trichonephila clavipes), Esmeralda and Gladys, for a 45-day voyage aboard the ISS.
They were kept in a nice environment (can you imagine spiders scattered on a space station), with light conditions to simulate an overnight cycle, temperature and humidity control, and a healthy diet of juicy fruit flies.
The two spiders changed beautifully, continuing to spin the nets and hunt their food. Orb weavers eat their figs at the end of each day to regain proteins, and spin them again in the morning; this, too, the spiders continued to correct on schedule, which was interesting, as different species of orb weaver on the ISS just spun their nets at any time of the day.
But not everything was completely normal. In microgravity, spiders spin their nets in a different way – flatter and more rounded, compared to the more three-dimensional, asymmetrical structures that orb weavers spin on. Land.
The two spiders returned to Earth at the end of their stay in space. Esmeralda died on the way back, after living the life of a normal spider. Gladys returned home hale, but it turned out he was a boy. Gladstone was renamed.
Tortoises orbit the moon
Back in the 1960s, before humans had been on the Moon, it was not clear how going up closely and personally with the Moon would affect us if at all physically. So, in 1968, the Soviet space program set up two Russian tortoises (Agrionemys horsfieldii) for a orbit around Earth’s companions.
In fact, it wasn’t just tortoises. The flight included wine flies, food worms, seeds, plants, algae and bacteria. There was also a bump with radiation sensors, as none of the organisms on board were human-like. Tortoises, according to a 1969 report, appear to have been chosen because they are relatively easy to take down.
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 15 September 1968, returning to Earth (in the Indian Ocean) on 21 September. They finally returned to Moscow on October 7th.
Their trip included seven days of space lighting, several days in tropical climates (including bobbing in the ocean while waiting to be recovered) and transportation on back to Russia. In the end, they spent 39 days without food. He would try anyone.
Control tortoises that remained on Earth were also removed from food for the same period. A comparison of the two sets of tortoises showed that any changes in the space reptiles were due to hunger, with a small contribution from atrophy associated with space light.
We’d say no one ever sent tortoises into space again, but sadly, two more tortoise missions happened. Zond 7 had tortoises in 1969. In 1975, the Soyuz spacecraft took 20 ferries in about 90 days. And two tortoises flew over the Salyut-5 space station in 1976.
Moon trees
Just as we did not once know how space would affect animals, so too were we unaware of its effect on plants. So when the Apollo 14 mission was launched on January 31, 1971, there was something in the cargo that we could now consider something strange: about 500 seeds.
Scientists from the U.S. Forestry Service wanted to find out if the seeds of trees that had flown in microgravity and been controlled by space radiation would explode, grow and look the same as seeds. who had not left Earth.
Five cans of tree were included in the canister: loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), California redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), and American sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua). They joined pilot model Stuart Roosa on 34 orbits of the Moon before returning to Earth.
The seeds were then sown and compressed, and most of them survived to grow into shoots, along with controls that had not left the Earth. It is no surprise to us now, that there was no clear difference between the two.
In 1975, the Moon Trees, as they were known, were large enough for transmission, and were sent all over America. According to this NASA website, fewer than 100 Moon Trees can be reported today, of which only 57 remained at the time the page was compiled.
That means hundreds of moon trees could be hidden across the U.S., a lost memory at a time when our curiosity planted tiny seeds whistling around a place. And we think that’s beautiful.