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Science

Building Objects With Water 42

Posted by michael from the shaky-foundations dept.
kjeldor writes "According to this NASA article, an experiment conducted on water in space shows that a metal loop dipped into water can sustain a thin membrane of water (just like soap bubbles) in diameters up to 4 or 5 inches without breaking. This surface can be moved around, painted on, etc. without breaking. Apparently, with the absence of gravity's pull to break the intermolecular forces, water has the ability to hold together into a membrane in an unconventional manner. This may lead to some interesting future projects."
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Building Objects With Water More

Building Objects With Water

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  • Umm.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Kevin Stevens ( 227724 ) <kevstev@ g m a i l .com> on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @09:51AM (#5385969)
    " This may lead to some interesting future projects."

    Because you have an easily accessible method of obtaining zero gravity???

    (could this be a driving force behind homebrew space vehicle projects?!)
    • Well I think what they are trying to say is that we don't have to get building material to space camp, we can use water.

      this saves on packaging and weight for space travel...

    • Future interesting projects indeed. Yeah, it's a little interesting that water behaves this way, but it's not water that is going to be the interesting material - it just doesn't have the properties as a sheet to be useful. However, think of other liquids (epoxy?) with similar properties that may harden. You now have a farily easy way of making sheet goods, panels, etc.
  • I bet NASA and ESA are gutted they have been spending billions taking up parts for the ISS when they could have just taken a bottle of water.
  • This surface can be moved around, painted on, etc. without breaking.

    Give's a whole new meaning to the term "water colour" doesn't it? I don't think we're going to see any of these "paintings" in any Earth-side art galleries any time soon though, although it does give the ISS inhabitants something to stick to their fridge with magnets along side their kid's efforts I suppose. ;)

  • "fascinating patterns emerged--some that looked like spiral galaxies" looking at the animation, am I alone in thinking that the universe could have started with a BIG... SQUIRT ?

  • Anyone remember polywater? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by auferstehung ( 150494 ) <moc.liamg ieb gnuhetsrefua.dnu.dot> on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @10:18AM (#5386111)

    It is ironic that water in space exhibits properties similiar to what was speculated to derive from the delusional Soviet discovery of polywater in the late 60's. See here [cmu.edu] and here [wlu.edu].

    I wonder if there were any Russians scientists on board the ISS who said, "I told you so, comrade, I told you so."

  • If NASA wants some more money why don't they bring some of those water paintings home by freezing them and then selling them on ebay?

    Space Ice Loops - starting bid: $3000

    Or better yet, make a couple thousand of them with some sugar and food coloring, and sell them as "NASA candy: Lollipops from outer space"...in your local frozen food section.

    NASA Candy - 2 for $4000

  • Hydrogen bonds.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by topologist ( 644470 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @10:47AM (#5386315)
    I'm not certain why this is news - we've long known in the absence of gravity, hydrogen bonds (the cause of surface tension) can do interesting things, like causing goodly amounts of water to form a sphere. While it's interesting to see high school kids send such experiments into space (even those are absurdly expensive, and shouldn't be done more than once every five years or so IMO), I'm astonished that this is the sort of thing trained astronauts are doing out there on their expensive vacations. Gregory Benford, the SF writer and an advisor to NASA, wrote a very interesting column a while ago deploring the quality of NASA's "experiments" and the vast amount of funding for the ISS and the shuttle program (a reusable vehicle that costs $0.5B permission?!) that could be better spent on more promising projects.

    • Re:Hydrogen bonds.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ioldanach ( 88584 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @02:26PM (#5388160)
      I'm astonished that this is the sort of thing trained astronauts are doing out there on their expensive vacations. Gregory Benford, the SF writer and an advisor to NASA, wrote a very interesting column a while ago deploring the quality of NASA's "experiments" and the vast amount of funding for the ISS and the shuttle program (a reusable vehicle that costs $0.5B permission?!) that could be better spent on more promising projects.

      Oh, please tell me you're joking. These people spend months at a time with no more than a handful of companions floating in space and working nearly every waking hour. This was done on this guy's day off. On his days off he plays and was going to make bubbles, but got playing with pure water instead. NASA didn't spend any money on any grand experiment here, he would've been relaxing some other way anyways. He just thought it was cool and worth sharing.

      Are you telling me you'd work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day with nothing but breaks for food and bathroom for 6 months at a time? I couldn't do that, and I don't know anyone who can.

      Get a grip.

      • Hmm - you're right, my little rant on the astronaut's game was uncalled for. But my general statement about the quality of NASA's experiments stands. NASA has thus far failed to experiment in any useful way with things like centrifugal gravity (essential for avoiding long term weightlessness effects such as bone loss), truly closed biospheres (as Benford put it, we're currently "space camping", not experimenting with space habitats), and a great many other essentials.

    • Benford's article is titled "Beyond the Shuttle" and can be found.. here [edge.org].

      As usual, Benford is +5 Insightful.
  • like ant farms, made of water!!

    children's letters to God, made of water!!

  • I'm not impressed (Score:5, Funny)

    by VikingBerserker ( 546589 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @11:09AM (#5386465)

    I've been able to create far more interesting shapes with water than thin circles. I don't even need lower gravity to accomplish this.

    The trick is to lower the temperature enough.

    • Re:I'm not impressed (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PD ( 9577 )
      Well, that triggered a question in my head. Has anyone frozen a soap bubble? I'm in Austin and it's not cold enough now to do it. Can someone in cold weather blow a soap bubble in freezing conditions and have it freeze in the air? Damn. I wish I had thought of trying that when I lived in Michigan.
      • Since your hot breath will cool very quickly, the bubble will contract and the membrane become unstable. The bubble will implode in about a second. I recall trying this out, too.
        • Ok, so what if you used canned 'computer duster' air, or some other means of inflating the bubbles that didn't blow warm air?

          Great, now I'll be outside this weekend with a can of air and a bottle of bubble solution. I hope it stays cold enough.

          ~Philly

  • Yeah for surface Energy!! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by b_pretender ( 105284 ) on Wednesday February 26, 2003 @11:28AM (#5386649)
    Surface energy is our friend. Dissolve a little soap in the water (to increase surface energy to bulk volume energy ratio) and these little blocks should stick together very well.

    Many people (scientists included) under estimate the significance of surface energy in day-to-day life. For example, crack a drinking glass on the counter top and measure the energy that it took to crack it. Now measure the energy it takes to crack it underwater and you will see that it is significantly and noticeable harder to crack glass underwater. Furthermore, the glass will rarely shatter underwatter. You may be able to notice a difference between cracking the glass on a humid day and on a dry day.

    • Next, break a different drinking glass over your head. Now, a friend's head. Now, an enemy's. Which was most satisfying? Why? Explain.

      Now, with your experience in drinking glasses, it's time to learn how to get into a bar fight...

    • Experimental setup:
      A C Clamp with a 3/4" bolt fitting for attatching a torque wrench is placed around the rim of the glass. One such apparatus is submerged in a sink, the other left in atmospheric conditions. A torque wrench is then used to tighten the C Clamp until the glass cracks.

      Findings:
      The glass cracks at similar forces under the water as above the water. In fact the glass in the water was cracked with slightly less applied force. I attribute this slight difference to measurement error and sample prep error. Because the work to crack the glasses is related to the force by the constant arm lenght of my torque wrench I claim that the energy needed to crack a glass under water is not significantly or noticeably greater than a glass on the counter top. Perhaps the error in your experiment was due to your energy enjection methods and not interface properties of glass and water.
  • so the surface tension holds it on and whatnot, the page says it's due to electric whosamacallit. what would happen if you made a square consisting of two opposite sides made of metal, and two opposite sides of a nonconductive material such as plastic? I suppose you'd have to add a small mineral content to make it conductive, but would it increase the total surface tension to the point of giving resistance to pressure, or would it decrease it, causing a short circut and blowing water droplets everywhere?
  • But isn't water incredibly heavy, therefore expensive, to send to space. I would bet water weighs more than alumninum and other building materials.

    • Try drinking aluminum when you're thirsty though....

    • It's not that water weighs more than everything else but the strengh/weight ratio is significantly less. It's no good taking something into space when you can have something else just as strong bt at a fraction of the weight.

      This trick with water will lead to some interesting experiments in the future and allows scientists a little extra flexibility to do their thing. You never know, this might lead to the next teflon! (Yes I know teflon wasn't invented in space etc)
    • nope, the specific gravity of aluminum is 2.6989, which is to say a block of aluminum is 2.7 times as heavy as a block of liquid water the same size. Now lithium's is 0.5, but using that as structural material would be very, very bad.

  • well... (Score:1)

    by C21 ( 643569 )
    it's funny that the article remarked about the ISS astronaut painting on the water, which reminds me of the art gallery that is proposed to be built and launched into deep space. I can't seem to find the link at the moment, but it discussed an art gallery that was supposedly going to be launched into space and would have an onboard camera that displayed the contents of the gallery to earth. I wonder if any artist's interest was piqued with this painting on water idea... Here's a link to art in space: http://arttech.about.com/library/weekly/aa080698.h tm
  • did we not already know this?
    did nobody do this previously?
    does such a simple experiment require being in space, as opposed to a simple freefall?
  • Like... what happens when you add droplets of water to the membrane? How thick could it get? Can you blow bubbles out of straight water?
  • Is it just me, or is the image of an astronaut trying to dip a metal loop into a container of water extremely funny?

    Seeing as how there's no gravity and all...

    Do they even have containers of water up there? I thought they only had those squeezy things. Perhaps they had to paint the water on before painting the paint on the water?
  • I don't see why we can't do the same thing on earth - I mean, The vomit comet will get you 20 seconds of zero-grav at a time, should be plenty to pull a water film out of a ziplock.

    I'd be MUCH more interested in how such a thing behaves UNDER gravity, once made. Especially, how long does it last?

    Also, if indeed it's gravity that's causing the water film to be impossible on earth, what if I froze a loop in some water, shaved off the rest (and only have the "frozen film" left), and then allowed it to melt? shouldn't I get the same thing? (for the skeptics, let's say I melt it from the center first, by blowing hot air on it or something.

    In the end, though - I am guessing that it probably won't be possible because water will all try to flow to the bottom of the sag, and the ring part will break due to insufficient surface tension - but I am still gonna try it out w/ the fridge!

  • late post (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mattr ( 78516 ) <mattr&telebody,com> on Saturday March 01, 2003 @10:58AM (#5413058) Homepage Journal
    Very few posts and anyway nobody will ever see this.. but the posts accuse that this is scientifically unimportant.


    It doesn't sound like slashdot users are all equipped to make that determination. In fact, it has no relevance whether someone ever did this before or not.


    It has great use in describing creative scientific endeavor and a sense of aesthetics which is not only great for young people's education, but also may even get adults to understand one of the reasons why we should be in space.


    In addition and what I find most exciting aside from the beauty of the results, is that this is similar in some ways to the recently theorized methods of using radio waves to build large structures in outer space. It is not hard to imagine for example that with some innovative chemical processing or perhaps just timely freezing water-based structures could be interesting aids in engineering. (How about putting vegetable oil on the surface of a water sphere, dyeing the oil with a metallic poweder, and throwing it out the window? or maybe fuse it with an exothermic reaction? Voila, you have a radar reflector (maybe antennas could be built this way - magnetic fields and perhaps iron filings in water to make the form. Not to mention, frothing it with air bubbles as with an ultrasonic toothbrush might make light foamy structures possible once frozen.

  • Quick, run to the Patent office so we can stifle any potential innovation to come of this.

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