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Exploding Water Balloons In Zero G
ArchAngel21x writes "Experimenters burst water balloons in the low-gravity environment produced aboard a NASA DC 9 aircraft. There are 3 videos available in QuickTime or MPEG." From the site: "The tests were conducted in part to develop the ability to rapidly deploy large liquid drops by rupturing an enclosing membrane. As can be seen from the experiment footage, the initial rupture process is nearly ideal, but the finite size of the balloon material eventually ejects a spray from the drop surface. Then, when the balloon material leaves the drop entirely, it causes a large deformation of the drop (blob) which oscillates throughout the remainder of the test. Calculations suggest that such oscillations will continue for hours before the drop eventually becomes spherical."
and i'm 98.7% sure it's been posted here on /. somewhere before
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
http://exploration.grc.nasa.gov/balloon/HS.HTM
Has anyone done porn in zero-G? I'm thinking bukkake could be big in zero G or super-high speed format.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
I want a bong and a budget too.
Soon our daily lives will be improved by new, exciting products based on Zero G Water Balloon Bursting technology.
The tests were conducted in part to develop the ability to rapidly deploy large liquid drops by rupturing an enclosing membrane.
All I can say is THANK GOD someone has finally researched this. I've lost count of the number of times I've wanted to rapidly deploy large liquid drops is a low/no-G environment.
Now can they please start with th research of the effects of pepper spray on penguins. That's the real science goldmine.
Or maybe I just should get some coffee before posting, mod parent down before somone can see it please.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
In fact, it is not stupid at all.
I am sure that the gathered knowledge can be used in many situations. One of them could be "Dealing with leaking liquids in space missions".
Of course, the old problem is still there - the time when this knowledge will be implemented into something useful might be very far away from now.
The saddest poem
This reminds me of the ZERO-G company, which offers commercial weightless flights on a specially-modified Boeing 727. Folks like Buzz Aldrin and Burt Rutan have flown on it, as well as everyone's favorite slashdotter John Carmack. Carmack posted a description of the flight, along with photos and a video.
I'd love to go myself, but I think it's still a little too rich for my poor grad-student blood.
was i the only one reminded of the movie "the abysss" while watching the clips?
From the bottom of the page:
This page was last updated on
Monday, 12 August, 2002 12:22 PM
Have you metaroderated recently?
I just wanted to clarify the parent's comment for those who don't necessarily know what the correct term is.
As someone who has done combustion experiments in the Glenn Research drop towers, I can authoritatively say that the term (that the parent likely means) is microgravity, not zero gravity. Zero gravity would imply that one is defying the rules of physics. Microgravity suggests merely that the effects of gravity are significantly diminished due to free fall: orbit, the vomit comet, or simply dropping a vessel in an evacuated tower.
Things having to do with such experiments are frequently labeled with neat mu-g stickers in NASAs facilities.
-Paul
Three years to forget what a herd of nerds feels like... just in case the server groans, here's the coral caches:
l loon/balloo01.mpg l loon/balloo02.mpg l loon/balloo03.mpg
http://microgravity.grc.nasa.gov.nyud.net:8090/ba
http://microgravity.grc.nasa.gov.nyud.net:8090/ba
http://microgravity.grc.nasa.gov.nyud.net:8090/ba
..what happens when potato chips are released in Zero G. Then I'll be able to make up my mind as to whether the Simpsons is real or pure fiction.
Regardless of all the sturm und drang you see in Congress over the NASA budget, it's not that big, and has shrunk continuously over the years (in absolute dollars it's about the same size now as 15 years ago when I first worked with them, never mind inflation). They get research planes when everyone else is finished with them. They have a beat to hell F/A-18 that they use for the HARV program, they have the only remaining operational SR-71, and lots of other aircraft that nobody else has use for, but NASA can use for a testbed for something cool.
(I believe that it was just recently expanded, but haven't followed the details)
Sometimes, it's the best course to use proven technology, rather than something new. The DC-9 is a proven airframe for this sort of work, and does its job quite well. Moving to a different sort of craft would require a lot of money and effort for frankly fairly little gains.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I really had resolved to sit this one out, to not get involved with all the NASA-bashing that such a page is guaranteed to inspire. And then I saw this.
It might be hard for someone in media-drenched America to understand, but the point of this was not to entertain you. I know, I know: It's virtually indecent to propose that anything be done for any reason other than your amusement. The point of these experiments was to learn something about fluid flow.
Maybe ILM could have made the samne movie -- and maybe not, because fluid flow is hard. Certainly they could have made a movie that you would have thought was a simulation of fluid flow in microgravity, because they're clever and because you (and no one else, really) has a firm idea of what that would be. But as a visual simulation it could teach us nothing new and concrete. And as a summer blockbuster it would likely have fallen flat.
These guys, on the other hand, are doing science. They're running experiments to explore the operation of the physical universe. Along the way, they came upon video footage that, they thought, looked "fun" and so they shared it. I can't see anything to be critical of here.
I'm sure I'll arouse the ire of the wrath from atop the thing by bringing up the old chestnut of spin-offs, but we have no idea of what practical applications willcome from this knowledge, and the knowledge that comes along with it that they didn't put on that page. It's fairly easy to see how understanding this could help with fuel injection systems, but I'm sure there are many other potential payoffs.
And yes, we do need to spend government money on that, because the payoff is uncertain. Private industry will not invest in basic research, whose beneficiaries are unknowable at the outset. Indeed often the people who make the money are not the ones who do the research. As for it being "uber" dollars: The entire NASA budget is about $16B. The federal budget is about $2,200B. So all of NASA is about about 1% of federal outlays. Not only is this smaller than the series of "emergency" outlays to cover the war in Iraq; it's smaller than the generic pork the Congress (and administration) roll into the budget.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
This is not a low gravity experiment. Technically the best you could call it is a virtual low gravity. The water is actually within the same gravity well as the plane is and is falling to the earth at the same speed. The difference is that it is enclosed in an atmosphere that is also falling at the same speed, or being forced to fall at the same speed. This does not necessarily remove all of the effects of gravity upon the fluid. The results might be similar in a real low gravity environment, but not the same. All this experiment shows is what happens if you fall to the earth at the same speed as the water and air is not whipping around the the water blob to cause deformation. It is important to remember the difference here.
If you are falling into a Black hole and all of the material around you is falling in at the same speed, does that mean you have negated the effects of the Black hole?
I've been thinking a lot about this stuff in my brief life.
I once had a dream where i was a fish in a "blob" of water floating around in microgravity. I kept seeing how close i could get to the edge, until i finally got too close and was sent out of the bubble and lost control completely. At that point i woke up.
Anyway, I would love to see that done in the same manner as these experiments.
I wrote NASA about this but no reply was received.
As we all know, cats always land on their feet when dropped. This task is achieved by rotating the tail in freefall and making use of Newton's third law, as the tail rotates in one direction the cat rotates in the other until its feet are pointing downwards.
How would a cat behave in a zero-g environment?
I suspect that the cat would spin its tail continuously in an effort to reach the right way up, but without access to either the space shuttle or an aircraft that can create zero-g I cannot prove this.
Any takers?
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
You would expect correct, not popular, terms used on Slashdot...
*ahem*
English is descriptive, not perscriptive.
English is descriptive, not perscriptive.
English is descriptive, not perscriptive.
Our spoken language evolves over time, and words mean no more and no less than how they are used by the greatest number of people.
While the technical or local jargon of certain elements of our culture may include more specific terminology to reflect a desired distinction, this does not in any way invalidate the correctness of the more common term.
"Zero Gravity" as meaning any time when there is no relative gravity is quite enough for most folk. The distinction between no effective gravity due to distance from an overriding mass ("zero G") and there being no effective gravity due to unhindered movement ("free-fall", or "Mu-G") is irrelevant in the common usage.
... the ability to rapidly deploy large liquid drops by rupturing an enclosing membrane.
Quick, somebody patent that! They were even nice enough to work out the lawlerly language for us!
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