Water Droplets In Orbit On the International Space Station

BuzzSkyline writes "Astronaut Don Pettit, who is aboard the International Space Station right now, puts charged water droplets into wild orbits around a knitting needle in the microgravity environment of the ISS. A video he made of the droplets is the first in a series of freefall physics experiments that he will be posting in coming months."

Comments

Re:All about energy

[vlm]

It's worth remembering that the V2 effort helped Germany lose WW2 - the energy needed to produce the fuel meant shortages of fuel for aviation and transport.

That is a LOL moment. If you're going to rewrite engineering history as part of tiresome environmental guilt trip prattle, don't do it on a website populated with engineers. Wrong both at the microscale in that A4/V2 didn't burn avgas or diesel or petrochemicals at all, wrong at the macroscale that every A4/V2 ever launched added together adds up to frankly not very much fuel. Those were relatively tiny SRBMs roughly similar performance to a modern MLRS not a thundering herd of saturn-5s.

fundamental physics research would simply awe the likes of Feynman ... if they were around to see it.

He didn't die that long ago, you know. Yes he chilled out with the manhatten project dudes as an extremely young man hanging with middle aged and old men. You may have missed he was on the Challenger loss commission in the 80s, etc. Even Dirac didn't die until the early 80s. If you want to surprise a physicist, find someone who croaked before WWII not a recently deceased.