illuminating science

Here’s a neat page that I stole from Slashdot, about popping water balloons in zero gravity! I don’t honestly know why these experiments were carried out, but they’re just too cool not to look at. The experiments involved popping a water filled balloon with a needle in low gravity conditions, in this case in a NASA plane that flies in a parabolic trajectory so that it falls with gravity. It’s just like jumping when a lift starts going down - gravity seems less because the lift is falling with you. The plane falls at almost the same rate as gravity, so even though the water balloon and everything else is accelerating, it doesn’t seem to be from inside the plane.

Check out the movies - they’re awesome! I particularly like the second one where they frantically try to capture the water in a plastic bag before the plane pulls out of its dive and the water splats to the floor. They don’t even bother in the third video!