Building Objects With Water

kjeldor writes "According to this NASA article, an experiment conducted on water in space shows that a metal loop dipped into water can sustain a thin membrane of water (just like soap bubbles) in diameters up to 4 or 5 inches without breaking. This surface can be moved around, painted on, etc. without breaking. Apparently, with the absence of gravity's pull to break the intermolecular forces, water has the ability to hold together into a membrane in an unconventional manner. This may lead to some interesting future projects."

Comments

Umm....

[Kevin Stevens]

" This may lead to some interesting future projects."

Because you have an easily accessible method of obtaining zero gravity???

(could this be a driving force behind homebrew space vehicle projects?!)

Anyone remember polywater?

[auferstehung]

It is ironic that water in space exhibits properties similiar to what was speculated to derive from the delusional Soviet discovery of polywater in the late 60's. See here and here.

I wonder if there were any Russians scientists on board the ISS who said, "I told you so, comrade, I told you so."

Hydrogen bonds..

[topologist]

I'm not certain why this is news - we've long known in the absence of gravity, hydrogen bonds (the cause of surface tension) can do interesting things, like causing goodly amounts of water to form a sphere. While it's interesting to see high school kids send such experiments into space (even those are absurdly expensive, and shouldn't be done more than once every five years or so IMO), I'm astonished that this is the sort of thing trained astronauts are doing out there on their expensive vacations. Gregory Benford, the SF writer and an advisor to NASA, wrote a very interesting column a while ago deploring the quality of NASA's "experiments" and the vast amount of funding for the ISS and the shuttle program (a reusable vehicle that costs $0.5B permission?!) that could be better spent on more promising projects.

Re:Hydrogen bonds..

[Ioldanach]

I'm astonished that this is the sort of thing trained astronauts are doing out there on their expensive vacations. Gregory Benford, the SF writer and an advisor to NASA, wrote a very interesting column a while ago deploring the quality of NASA's "experiments" and the vast amount of funding for the ISS and the shuttle program (a reusable vehicle that costs $0.5B permission?!) that could be better spent on more promising projects.

Oh, please tell me you're joking. These people spend months at a time with no more than a handful of companions floating in space and working nearly every waking hour. This was done on this guy's day off. On his days off he plays and was going to make bubbles, but got playing with pure water instead. NASA didn't spend any money on any grand experiment here, he would've been relaxing some other way anyways. He just thought it was cool and worth sharing.

Are you telling me you'd work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day with nothing but breaks for food and bathroom for 6 months at a time? I couldn't do that, and I don't know anyone who can.

Get a grip.

I'm not impressed

[VikingBerserker]

I've been able to create far more interesting shapes with water than thin circles. I don't even need lower gravity to accomplish this.

The trick is to lower the temperature enough.

Re:I'm not impressed

[PD]

Well, that triggered a question in my head. Has anyone frozen a soap bubble? I'm in Austin and it's not cold enough now to do it. Can someone in cold weather blow a soap bubble in freezing conditions and have it freeze in the air? Damn. I wish I had thought of trying that when I lived in Michigan.

Yeah for surface Energy!!

[b_pretender]

Surface energy is our friend. Dissolve a little soap in the water (to increase surface energy to bulk volume energy ratio) and these little blocks should stick together very well.

Many people (scientists included) under estimate the significance of surface energy in day-to-day life. For example, crack a drinking glass on the counter top and measure the energy that it took to crack it. Now measure the energy it takes to crack it underwater and you will see that it is significantly and noticeable harder to crack glass underwater. Furthermore, the glass will rarely shatter underwatter. You may be able to notice a difference between cracking the glass on a humid day and on a dry day.

Re:Heavy

[CSG_SurferDude]

Try drinking aluminum when you're thirsty though....

Re: Freezing Soap Bubbles

[matthewcraig]

Since your hot breath will cool very quickly, the bubble will contract and the membrane become unstable. The bubble will implode in about a second. I recall trying this out, too.

late post

[mattr]

Very few posts and anyway nobody will ever see this.. but the posts accuse that this is scientifically unimportant.

It doesn't sound like slashdot users are all equipped to make that determination. In fact, it has no relevance whether someone ever did this before or not.

It has great use in describing creative scientific endeavor and a sense of aesthetics which is not only great for young people's education, but also may even get adults to understand one of the reasons why we should be in space.

In addition and what I find most exciting aside from the beauty of the results, is that this is similar in some ways to the recently theorized methods of using radio waves to build large structures in outer space. It is not hard to imagine for example that with some innovative chemical processing or perhaps just timely freezing water-based structures could be interesting aids in engineering. (How about putting vegetable oil on the surface of a water sphere, dyeing the oil with a metallic poweder, and throwing it out the window? or maybe fuse it with an exothermic reaction? Voila, you have a radar reflector (maybe antennas could be built this way - magnetic fields and perhaps iron filings in water to make the form. Not to mention, frothing it with air bubbles as with an ultrasonic toothbrush might make light foamy structures possible once frozen.