Microgravity Coffee Cup

BuzzSkyline writes "Despite the fact that astronauts have been eating and drinking out of tubes for decades, it's actually possible to drink from an open-top cup in space. Astronaut Don Pettit recently downlinked a video that shows him slurping coffee from a cup he kludged out of plastic sheet. It appears to work pretty much like a cup on Earth, even in freefall aboard the International Space Station, thanks to capillary action."

Comments

Re:Not just capillary action.

[nadaou]

I said it was a manifestation of it, not that the two were equivalent terms.

I highly recommend the MIT video series by Asher Shapiro on the subject:

http://web.mit.edu/hml/ncfmf.html

"Surface Tension in Fluid Mechanics"

the videos are excellent (and that's a big understatement), but if you are in a hurry just have a look at the section talking about contact angles in the film notes: http://web.mit.edu/hml/ncfmf/04STFM.pdf