Watch: NASA astronauts turn water into floating crystal ball in space
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently released a breathtaking video of an experiment performed by the Artemis II crew while being aboard the Orion capsule in space.
The experiment explains what happens to a water droplet if released in a near-weightless environment of space.
The crew aboard the moon mission found time to play with a water droplet and released it in the air to see how it behaves in the weightlessness of space.
The video shows the droplet floating in the capsule in the form of a perfect sphere, like a crystal clear ball. The droplet was later catched via straw and released into microgravity.
NASA said, “During the Artemis II mission, astronauts had a fun time playing around in the weightlessness of space. The mission was Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s first spaceflight – so his crewmates taught him a lot about the physics of water in space.”
If a droplet of water is dropped on Earth, it flattens on the surface due to gravitational force; however, in space the phenomenon is different because the molecules on the surface attract each other equally in all directions, turning it into a sphere.
Space enthusiasts appeared delighted by the video with one saying, “It can’t be all seriousness in space – you gotta have a little fun too.” Another chimed in, “It felt like Pure Magic.”
