Students Get Stellar Science Advice Shuttle Astronaut Answers Long-Distance Questions
Sixth-grader Ryan Brutger placed the ultimate long-distance telephone call to get some science advice this week.
He wanted to know if epsom salt crystals grow in zero gravity. So he asked Catherine Coleman, who at the moment was floating in the Space Shuttle Columbia as it flew at 5 miles per second about 150 miles above the Pacific Ocean.
Brutger and about 200 other Bozeman and Big Timber sixth-graders watched Coleman live, on a giant screen at the Museum of the Rockies. They were finishing a NASA micro-gravity experiment that they started working on last year, as fifth-graders. Only three other schools in the nation used the live television-phone link to the shuttle.
Coleman looked fairly normal in the shuttle’s micro-gravity lab when she appeared on the video projection. She wore a shirt and pants instead of a space suit, and appeared to be standing on the floor. The only difference was that her ponytail and dog tags kept floating around her head.
Her feet were in floor stirrups to keep her from floating away as well.
Turns out it is possible to grow crystals in space, Coleman said. In fact, the weightless confines of the space shuttle may be the perfect place to grow crystals that could revolutionize the world.
The Bozeman students included some former Willson Science and Technology School fifth-graders who worked on micro-gravity experiments last year. There also were students from the Bozeman Gifted and Talented Education program, the ham radio club and the Science Olympiad teams. The Big Timber students were winners of a national NASA contest for new airplane designs.
The students’ group experiment looked as low-tech as a Halloween party. They filled sealable plastic bags with M&Ms and marshmallows, inflated the bags, and shook them. Then they looked to see how the candies settled when the shaking stopped.
When all 200 students shook their bags, the Museum of the Rockies auditorium sounded like a bird sanctuary in full flight. The harder they rattled the candies, the more the M&Ms tended to sink to the bottom of the bags.
When Coleman shook her bag of candies on the shuttle, no pattern appeared. But in the weightless world of space, that was a pattern in itself.
Coleman explained gravity tends to make heavier objects, like M&Ms, settle to the bottom of mixtures. That principle applies to some extent all the way down to atom-sized particles.
In weightless space, particles mix more evenly since gravity isn’t separating them by mass. That means the chemical mixtures that make computer chips form in a more perfect and effective fashion.
That could also be the trick for making better crystals used in gasoline production. If the crystals could get just 1 percent more gas out of crude petroleum, that could save millions of dollars in the world’s annual energy spending.
Brutger and 19 other students won a lottery to present their questions directly to Coleman during the live broadcast. Kelly Morgan wanted to know what would happen if the candy bag was in a vacuum as well as weightless. Coleman said the marshmallows probably would explode when the air inside them expanded.
Maureen Bald asked how someone might mix a cake in space, since ingredients didn’t seem to combine very well. Wouldn’t everything just float out of the mixing bowl, she asked?
Coleman said most mixing in space was done in sealed bags to avoid that problem.