Sunday, February 15, 2004

I'm going to be an astronaut when I grow up

Wow, a non-rant. Enjoy.

The 'vomit comet', a NASA airplane that simulates zero-gravity through parabolic flight, was used to perform some fluid dynamics experiments involving water balloons. (Why don't *I* have that job?) Popping the balloons in zero-G, the experimenters were able to observe resonance waves bouncing back and forth through the blob of fluid. There are a few videos (Quicktime and MPEG) that are worth checking out... I like the one where a guy blows an airbubble into the center of the blob with a straw, and everyone is so entranced that they forget to 'bag' the water before the gravity got turned back on.