Hey it's me Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So a couple of weeks ago I asked a question
here on Smarter Every Day in hopes that it would be beamed up to the space station so the
astronauts could answer. Well that happened. - Why don't we take the next question on YouTube.
I'm Destin from Huntsville Alabama. This is Sadie and Spotsy.
On the International Space Station, if you're free falling in one position, without touching anything,
with no spin, is it possible to wiggle in such a way that you're able to rotate
to a different angular position and then stop? On Smarter Every Day we
demonstrated this with a high speed camera and a cat, who is a non holonomic system and
can do this by extending his legs, arching his back and twisting in a very specific pattern.
So can humans do this on orbit? You want to say hey to the astronauts? - Hey.
- Thank you. We look up to you guys. - OK well that's a great question.
We don't have any cats on board, but we have a medical doctor
who maybe can try to demonstrate, the next best thing to a cat.
So he's gonna try to demonstrate for you. Yes indeed you can, you can do this. So he's gonna get out
here and stop himself in open space, and he's gonna show you how he can turn himself
around. So he can't change his angular momentum but he can
change his body position and move himself to an orientation. So, I hope you
believe that what you saw happen with the cat isn't a mystery
and that it can happen in space too. Great question. - So needless to say
I'm very excited about how this went down. Sadie has one more question by the way. What's your question?
- Why do you not have a cat on board? [laugh]
So one day I hope to do research on the international space station myself.
So I thought it'd be pretty cool if I took a time hack and figured out exactly where the guys were when we
were talking. Turns out when they started listening to my question they were over the top of
Ecuador, and in the 70 seconds that we talked, they buzzed across the
equator, over Peru, which is cool because I spent a lot of time in Peru, and
into Columbia. I also thought it was pretty cool that after they answered the question you could see
Chris Hadfield over to the side. You can see the gears turning in his head, and I think
when the camera started flipping off he started doing a little test himself. He thinks
like me. He wants to figure things out. Which is good, to have people like that on the space station.
You heard me say that I look up to you. But I'm not trying to be funny or anything
like that. I actually do watch the International Space Station pass over my house. The tool I
use is heavens-above.com. You can go and you can enter where
your house is, and it'll tell you the next times that the ISS is gonna pass overhead.
It's really awesome. Even tells you where to look. Anyway, so I recommend going to do that.
But, warning, if you do that you're gonna have to turn your computer off and walk outside the house
and actually observe some real science, so maybe you should do that.
So I'd like to leave you with this. You are bound on the earth like I am, but
there is a human, that is ambassador for you in a weightless environment up on the International
Space Station, and he tweets every day. All you have to do is follow these
guys. They're up there. They're gonna pipe down pictures that they take every day and they're
really interesting. All you have to do is not be lazy and go look at what they're doing.
It's really cool. Also you should follow NASA. They have good stuff every day.
For some reason if you want to follow a less interesting guy, I'm right here. Feel free to look at my stuff
as well. Anyway I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. That was awesome.
Have a good one. (Crowd) 5.. 4.. 3..
2.. 1.. Fire!
[rocket launch] [excited squeals]
[ Captions by Andrew Jackson ] captionsbyandrew.wordpress.com
Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.