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To Boldly Go Where No Mento Has Gone Before
rjwoodhead writes "This past weekend, my entire family learned what it's like to float in freefall aboard G-Force One (recently featured on the Mythbusters' Moon Hoax show). Being science-lovers, we wanted to do some kind of original experiment. So we decided to test whether the Diet Coke & Mentos reaction was affected by the lack of bubble convection in microgravity. At the link you can find the story of how the experiment evolved and how we talked Space Adventures into letting us fool around with sticky and corrosive cola and candy inside their nice clean airplane, as well as high-speed video of the results."
They probably handle that the same way they handle that sticky and corrosive stomach acid and stomach contents.
...and more fun too, or so I'm told.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
He says 4 grand in the blog - and over at the zero g site it says 5200 when taxes are included, so it looks like prices have been bumped up. I'm still going to start saving up for it though.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Good luck getting Space Adventures to allow to "fool around" with that experiment.
I'm pretty sure the singular of Mentos is still Mentos.
In summary, they had great difficulty getting a classic mentos/diet coke reaction. From problems with the camera to issues getting a mento and coke together. Add in some residual gravity, and it was a complete failure. No explosions, not even any cool looking video.
A very poor result from such a promising premise.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
I really, really should know this but...what's the music in the video?
It doesn't work
Why is this news?
1) This is entertainment..slashdot.org
2) You must be new here.
3) It's better than the slashvertisement three stories back, though to be fair there was some M$ bashing two stories back.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Idle by any other name is still the same...
G-Force-One does not simulate a lack of gravity. It creates a SENSORY ILLUSION of weightlessness.
People who are on the plane are inside an environment. That environment provides them with sensory feedback which is the basis for their perception of "what is happening" around them.
When the plane goes into a dive, it matches the speed of an object in free-fall. This causes the environment around the people to "fall" at the same speed the people are falling, so they stay in the same space within the environment. The air rushing by, and the ground rushing up at them are hidden by the environment's container (the plane) and thus warps people's perception of reality making them appear to their mind's eye to be "weightless."
There is, however, no ACTUAL reduction in the effects of gravity due to the free-fall. (There is a slight reduction in the effect of gravity due only to their distance from the core of the earth being greater than if they were on the ground, which is a barely measurable change, and changes constantly, getting stronger as the entire environment gets closer to Earth.)
Because the microgravity experienced is only an illusion, experiments performed in that environment are *NOT* equivalent to being in a true microgravity environment such as the ISS, the Space Shuttle, or any other craft in orbit. (Note that "in orbit" is still inside the event horizon of Earth's gravitational well.)
If you were to carry out the same micgrogravity experiment on the ground, on G-Force-One, and on the ISS, you should see nearly identical results on the ground and on G-Force-One. Carrying out the experiments on the ISS could give drastically different results, because the gravity effects there would be reduced to nearly nothing.
Even on the ISS the effects of the Earth's gravity are still only reduced. (greatly reduced by distance) But.. becuase the ISS is in-orbit around the planet, it is still inside the event horizon of Earth's gravity well, making it's primary gravitational influence the Earth.
Where experiments would become fascinating is in a satellite in an orbit above Earth that matches the angle and period of the moon's, at a distance that would cause an equal gravitational pull from both Earth and the Moon, and see what happens with two equal but opposite gravity sources effecting the experiment!
It's also curious to think if placing a satellite in such an orbit would even be possible, since it would not be able to use the Earth's gravitational well as an anchor for it's orbit. (It would have to be beyond the event horizons of the gravity wells of both the earth and the moon.. without a gravity well to anchor it into an orbit.. it would just keep going in whatever direction inertia was carrying it.)
Whatever you may think about the rules that the TSA enforces (and I agree with Bruce Schneier in that regard), the fact of the matter is that the frontline staff that you deal with have little or no freedom to apply common-sense discretion, and are often placed in situations where they don't have the time, or the background knowledge, to make an informed decision, which means that the default answer is "no". When you couple that with the fact that anyone can be having a horrible day, and some small percentage of people are jerks to begin with (a smaller percentage than most people assume), and multiply by hundreds of thousands of people going through security a day, it's a recipe for horror stories.
...and then he describes how they were pre-briefed and OK with everything...except some clay. Yeah, you heard that right. They were briefed ahead of time, there was no terrorist risk, and these asshats objected to clay because it looked like plastic explosive.
This has nothing to do with the people going through security, and it's only partly the rules. It is absolutely not okay for a TSA agent to "have a bad day" and do anything except apply TSA policies in a humane but consistent manner. If they can't do so on a "bad day", they need to find a different job.
TSA screeners and management absolutely LOVE the fact that despite being badly paid, undereducated, and almost always minorities- being a TSA agent places them at the top of the food-chain in an airport. Their words and decisions are that of god, and with a word they can transform anyone's business trip or vacation into sheer hell. Like the case where TSA screeners forced a new mother to drink her own breastmilk to prove it wasn't an explosive or poison.
They're also, in many cases, dumber than fenceposts. The guy whose Audi key was confiscated because it was a "switchblade", the Macbook Air fiasco...I'm sure there are thousands of similar incidents we never hear about.
For chrissakes, these people banned NAIL CLIPPERS and thought liquid binary explosives were possible to deploy on a plane because they'd seen in the movies that the baddies had these scary devices that mixed different colored liquids...
Please help metamoderate.
But.. becuase the ISS is in-orbit around the planet, it is still inside the event horizon of Earth's gravity well, making it's primary gravitational influence the Earth.
Holy crap! Nobody told me that the earth is actually a black hole... We're all DOOMED!
That is some bad trolling there.
If you are in a sealed container, with no way to measure outside the container, being in G-Force-One when it is in the free fall part of its flight is indistinguishable from being on the ISS, as far as gravity goes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microgravity
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I have too much time and money and I don't know what to do with either.
Cos it's science done right
Hypothesis, test, rethink loop.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I've nothing to contribute, but will do so anyway.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The music in the video was REALLY creepy...
When the plane goes into a dive, it matches the speed of an object in free-fall. This causes the environment around the people to "fall" at the same speed the people are falling, so they stay in the same space within the environment.
And how, pray tell, does that differ from the orbiting space shuttle, or the ISS?
IIRC, the shuttle's trajectory traces out an ellipse. The zero-G airplane traces out a parabola. But, its parabola is just an aborted ellipse; aborted because you crash into the thing you were attempting to orbit (because your parabola wasn't wide enough to miss the edge of the thing you were trying to orbit.)
(So once again, we learn that Douglas Adams was right: the key to flying is to throw yourself at the ground, and miss.)
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Sorry to burst your bubble, but you're incorrect. Ever hear of the Principle of Equivalence? The force of gravity experienced by an observer on the ground is no different than the pseudo-force experienced in an accelerated reference frame. So when the acceleration of the reference frame is precisely opposite the force of gravity, the real and pseudo- forces cancel out, barring tidal effects and microchanges.
The "equal gravitational pull" location is L1 (Lagrange Point 1) between the Earth and its moon. There is another between the Earth and Sol. Objects in L1s are susceptible to small forces however. L4s and L5s are much more stable, but are still orbits, so not clear of the primary's (Earth, Sol, ...) significant gravity well.
He wrote Wizardry. Next thing you'll be telling me that they're going to shoot Richard "Lord British" Garriott into space.
Your point may be technically accurate, but it's misleading. The only difference between a parabolic flight and an elliptical orbit is that one intersects the Earth, and one does not. Of course, that whole hitting the Earth part kinda sucks, so that's why the airplane pulls out of its dive.
In orbit, the acceleration due to gravity is still substantial. The only difference is, the velocity tangent to that vector is sufficient that you're always falling towards Earth, but you always miss hitting it. You're falling over the horizon.
"(Note that "in orbit" is still inside the event horizon of Earth's gravitational well.) "
Event horizon has a specific meaning, and none whatsoever when not talking about black holes. There is no "event horizon" of Earth's gravitational well. It simply gets arbitrarily small with increasing distance.
"Where experiments would become fascinating is in a satellite in an orbit above Earth that matches the angle and period of the moon's, at a distance that would cause an equal gravitational pull from both Earth and the Moon, and see what happens with two equal but opposite gravity sources effecting the experiment!"
That's not really an orbit, that's a Lagrange point. The effects will be indistinguishable from orbit. Inertial frames of reference are indistinguishable.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Am I the only one, who finds the expression — especially, when used in reference to oneself — rather pretentious?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
'Nuff said.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
As a nice, bright and shiny illustration of just how safe you are with these people being given free reign is illustrated by the story of how the TSA grounded 9 planes. My favorite quote: "TSA agents are now doing things to our aircraft that may put our lives, and the lives of our passengers at risk".
I am yet to be convinced there is a measurable return on investment for the money wasted on TSA, investment in HUMINT would have been a better use of the budget. and THAT annoys me most when those morons do their usual.
I guess the use of room temperature IQs is essential to stop anyone from thinking about what they're doing, but the result is that they give the impression of being people rejected for writing parking tickets because they were too stupid.
You left off parts of what he said. They might not support your rant so well, but I think they provide a more complete picture.
And I'd also like to thank the TSA screeners, who arrived on site already totally up to speed on what we wanted to do (they'd even seen my test videos).
But in our case, since the screeners had been pre-briefed, it was easy to demonstrate that everything we wanted to use was well within the TSA rules. The only thing that didn't fly was a tiny ball of modelling clay that we were going to use to mount the mento onto a ziptie with, and the screeners helped brainstorm an acceptable (and better!) mounting method.
You summarized part of the bottom quote, but not all of it.
In an earlier blog he points out that as a commercial flight, the TSA rules must be obeyed and he still had to be screened by the TSA (yes, that's silly), but he wasn't talking about the regular line at an airport.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
I always thought the people take diet coke instead of normal coke precisely because it is not sticky, because it does not contain sugar. And I also used to believe that most of the corrosive behaviour of coke also comes from the sugar. But that's just me.
For anyone who is curious about it, the blog says that they flew out of Las Vegas. Zero G's FAQ says that they use the Signature Air Terminal at the main airport there. Signature Air Services is basically a chain of Fixed Based Operators (FBOs). They serve business and private pilots mostly. They use the same runways, but different buildings compared to the airlines.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
G-Force-One does not simulate a lack of gravity. It creates a SENSORY ILLUSION of weightlessness.
[Subsequent explanation of how G-Force-One does not create a lack of gravity, but does indeed simulate a lack of gravity deleted.]
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
When you are in orbit, you are still subject to gravity. The satellite is falling like the plane does, but it's moving so fast that it never hits the ground, like the plane would. A uniformly accelerating frame of reference is indistinguishable from an inertial frame of reference.
You have to get started before at least 4 minutes and 30 seconds you do the 30 seconds of gorasmic decent. No problem.
To test the coke and mentos experiment with a stick and water bottle.
Yeah, what the parent said.
I'd point out the other factual inaccuracies in your ramblings, but you're either trolling or too convinced of your own ideas to listen, so I won't bother.
Shades of tubgirl