Ants... In... Space

Ant writes "The Fowler students picked an experiment with ants, rather than plants, because they wanted to see some activity in space. They have been following the ants' progress on the web. The students and their teachers also have learned that sometimes the best thought-out hypothesis does not pan out in reality. 'We predicted that the ants would tunnel a lot slower in microgravity, but we're finding out they're moving a lot faster,' said Golash. The students have a control group of ants at their school, living in a similar environment except with gravity. After the shuttle returns from its scheduled 16-day flight in early February, the young scientists will have 30 days to put together a preliminary report. Their "Ants in Space" experiment was sponsored by SPACEHAB, an aerospace company that has worked with NASA for many years to design and build hardware for space experiments."

Comments

So if ants can lift ten times their body weight...

[n.wegner]

How can they lift anything in microgravity?

The question is

[Kohath]

Can they sort tiny screws?

Re:The question is

[nakedjames]

dammit, that was my question. :(

-Quick, save the queen!
-Which one of us is the queen?
-I'm the queen!
-No you're not!

-Freedom! Horrible horrible freedom!

You fool! Now we'll never know if ants can be taught to sort tiny screws in space!

Re:The question is

[helix400]

Dangit! Both of you beat me to those. But here's another classic. =)

Kent Brockman: Ladies and gentlemen, er, we've just lost the picture, but, uh, what we've seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over -- "conquered", if you will -- by a master race of giant space ants. It's difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

Courtesy of The Simpsons Archive

So...

[antaeogo]

If the shuttle crashes during re-entry, they can blame it on a bug in the system?

Questions about ants

[Entropy248]

I wonder if it would even be possible for an ant to build a hive in low or no gravity situations. Maybe someone who passed physics can tell me if I'm wrong. I thought that if an ant pushed a stone up, it would keep going until it hit another stone, which would receive the first's momentum, absorb a little bit and pass it on, making all of the tunnels above what you just dug collapse upward.

It would really suck if those ants got loose into the shuttle! Though they might find it to be a shocking experience to meet the electrical system (*cheap rim shot*)

I bet that guy from *NSync is really pissed now that even the lowly ant has beaten him out.

Uhhh... It's really late & I'm drunk.
In Soviet Russia, ants launch you into space.
Profit.
==
And for my next trick, I will disappear.

Re:Questions about ants

[EvilTwinSkippy]

You have to remember that at extremely small scales, different physical forces come into play.

In this case, electrical charge. The rocks and pebbles "stick" to each other as a result. Even under the effects of Earth's gravity, this stickyness factor is a greater force than weight.

If you remember, an aerospace engineer is credited with saying that bumblebees can't fly. (It's actually a misquote.) At that scale, air resistance is a greater influence than weight. They are constantly falling, but their terminal velocity is so rediculously slow that their puny little wings can push them up at a greater rate. Kind of like a blimb with a negative bouyancy.

Re:Questions about ants

[Jerf]

Another thing you need to remember that hasn't been pointed out yet is that while the forces do indeed propogate upwards, they disperse. They don't maintain their strength in the way I'm almost certain you're imagining, they get weaker and weaker, until quite rapidly they are simply swamped by simple friction and other electromagnetic effects and get absorbed into the system as incredibly tiny amounts of heat.

This is why when you jump on the ground, nobody on the opposite side of the planet suddenly feels a bump. The forces disperse to effective nonexistance (since they can't be conceivably detected anymore). Even really really large bumbs like Richter 7.5 earthquakes require very sensitive devices to detect them after a few hundred miles.

Their findings

[yuckf00]

1. The ants were confused and scared. 2. The ants were confused and scared. 3. The ants were confused and scared.

Simpson's Jokes Aside

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Space Shuttle Orbiter: $4 billion
Launch Preparations: $130 million
Anti-Grav Ant Colony: $2000

The fact that 30 years after we put man on the moon, this is the best NASA can come up with: Unfathomible.

You know, how about we try seeing how ants tunnel in Lunar Regolith, or Martian soil. That would be intersting.

This is great for the kids, but I think it just shows how far NASA has NOT come.

Re:So if ants can lift ten times their body weight

[TekReggard]

I fear you fail to see the sarcasm. I have to agree with him on this one. The ant is said to be capable of lifting 10 times its own body weight, so why would the students predict that the ants would tunnel slower in space than on earth?

I could only attribute this to concepts based on hinderences to human's movements in space. They probably assumed that since Humans have a harder time coordinating while in space suits on different worlds that Ants would have a harder time coordinating in small tunnels in a controled environment.

This of course has so far been proved false, because the Ants have several legs and movement through said tunnels would probably be easier with lower gravity in the same way humans could probably move faster in tunnels on the moon than we could here on earth. Think of it this way, we could jump down a cooridor on the moon far faster than we could walk run or crawl through it on earth.

Newts in space! (space space space)

[t0qer]

I think slash needs a new mod point (weird) anyways..

When I was 12-14 I was really into model rockets. I lived with my grandmother at the time and her yard had all kinds of newts and salamanders in it.

"OOH ASTRONEWTS!" Was the first thing that popped into my head.

I forget the model number, but it was an estes rocket with a clear payload chamber on it. I placed my "ASTRONEWT!" into the payload chamber, taped the fuse on the bottom of my C6-7 engine and then backed up for safety.

"HOUSTON THIS IS MISSION CONTROL, BEGINNING FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR LAUNCH!" I could see the little critter had no idea he was about to be launched into the stratosphere as he wiggled and squirmed inside of his cramped quarters.

"5-4-3-2-1 MAIN ENGINES ARE GO YOU HAVE CLEARED THE TOWER" This was about the 10th rocket I had built that year, everything on it was perfect, the wings had been sanded down and painted in 2 coats, same went for the body. This thing had to be the most arodynamically sound rocket I had ever built in my life because it just kept climbing and climbing.

"HOUSTON THIS IS MISSION CONTROL, WE ARE SHOWING YOU HAVE DEPLOYED YOUR RE-ENTRY PARACHUTES"

The rocket had flown so high I had to hop on my bike and chase it down. It ended up about 1/2 mile from where it had launched.

"HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM"

I looked at the rocket, and inside the poor newt wasn't squirming anymore. I don't know if he had died from shock, g forces, or what, but he was dead. I would have guess G forces from the condition of the corpse.

Well, after that I ended the astronewt program. Yeah it was a fucked up thing to do, and I regret it as an adult, but we were talking about animal experiments in space right?

Why Humans Move Slow in Space

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Human are trained to move artificially in space. The first few times astronauts tried to work in space, they kept losing control. (Hell Cernin had to abort the second gemini EVA because he became so overheated that his helmet fogged up.)

It wasn't until Buzz Aldrin's EVA during the last Gemini mission that they had worked out a set of maneuvers and restraints to make sure that when an astronaut turned a knob, he didn't turn instead.

Now, an ant is never free floating. She always has something to hold onto, the tunnel. But if we have learned anything in space, you really can't assume anything. You have to observe it and see how it actually behaves.

Take fire for instance. You take it for granted here on earth that you can see the flames. Well, flames are caused by convection, which does't happen in micro-gravity. Hot air has the same "weight" as cold air. Instead the plasma forms a sphere that is tricky to see. Smoke does not rise from the fire for the very same reason.

With that sort of information, NASA found they had to design completely new fire detection systems for the ISS.

Preliminary report..

[LilGuy]

1. Ants dig faster in space than on Earth.

2. We probably wasted thousands of tax dollars on this experiment.

In other news.....

[Nemus]

In other news, it was discovered that when placed in a 0g environment, dung beetles still played with shit.

"Eh, its a job." one beetle was reported as saying, before munching on a space turd.

Seriously, I'm all for getting kids involved in science and mathematics, but this is probably one of the dumbest experiments I've ever heard of. Unless the ants evolve into giant mutant space ants before the shuttle returns, I don't see how this can be of any practical value.

I'm trying and I really can't think of any solid benefits from trying this. Couldn't they have tried to design something a little more practical, or was this just dumbing down the project for lower-level students, like all schools do?

I imagine some of the smarter students had some more interesting ideas, but they weren't accepted, cause lil john and jane wouldn't have a clue what was going on. God forbid we actually challenge kids to learn something advanced.

Ants?

[Seehund]

Are the effects of space travel and microgravity on ants inherently more interesting for Nerds than the same effects on the web weaving of spiders, or cocoon spinning of silkworms, or the growth of crystalline filaments, or the eggs, development and taxis of Medaka fish, or the tunneling habits of carpenter bees?

Kids from 6 countries participate with 6 projects in this. WTF is so special with ants that hasn't been done before? Is it because "Fowler Highschool" is more easily pronounced than "Liechtenstein Gymnasium" for some people, or what?

Re:Ants?

[nentwined]

I have to say, I think the israeli chemical garden (as scary as that title may be) is by FAR the best thought out of the bunch. Most of them are "gee, let's see if this creature turns out or acts any different, just because, well, they might". The chemical garden is nifty in that it actually gives scientific explanations as to what might change, and why -- multiple hypotheses, even. la la la.