MAGNUS: Hi. I'm Sandra Magnus,
member of the Expedition 18 crew
aboard the International Space Station,
and I'd like to welcome you on board our lovely station.
We're gonna talk a little bit today
about what it takes to build a space station
and all the busy work we've been doing up here
since I arrived four months ago.
It's been quite an adventure.
A lot of people wonder, you know,
"Why are we doing all these things in space?
What is so special about this environment
that makes us want to come up here and do these things?"
I want to share a very interesting phenomenon with you
that I find utterly fascinating
and I think that we still have yet to learn a lot about,
and that's the behavior of liquids.
You know, we do a lot of studies on fluids up here,
and that's because surface tension
is a very dominant factor up here,
where on the ground, gravity tends to be the dominant factor.
What surface tension does is it tends to want to make --
For liquids, it tends to want to make it behave --
Let me move a little closer so you can see this.
It tends to make liquids behave a lot differently.
And the natural shape is a sphere.
That's the lowest-energy shape for a liquid.
But what's interesting is, because of surface tension,
you put a liquid on an object, and it really --
It wants to stick to the object
'cause it changes the physics a little bit.
And, so, let me put a bunch of liquid on my hand.
I have to be very careful 'cause I'm in the laboratory
and I really don't want to make a mess.
Now, I can make a glove of water on my hand.
Let me move a little bit closer.
And I put some water on my hand.
And of course, on the ground, this doesn't work
because it falls down.
Can you see the water between my fingers?
This is all driven by surface tension
that's driving the behavior of the water.
So, what can you do with this phenomenon?
How can you use this to make new and interesting things?
If you put little particles,
like the colloids that I mentioned earlier,
in a liquid like this
and apply a magnetic field or apply an electric field
or apply a mechanical stress
or something that changes the properties
of how those particles behave in the liquid,
what kind of systems can you come up with?
What kind of systems can you engineer?
What kind of fundamental physics
are we going to discover from such behavior?
We can study this here.
We can't study this on the planet.
I find this really fascinating,
and I'm not really sure we understand
all of the possible applications that you can get
from a behavior like this.
Will it do this on the Moon?
You know, what kind of a step of gravity do we need
in order to lose this type of behavior?
Or is there something different?
You know, you can do the calculations,
and you can understand this from the calculations.
And we discussed surface tension when I took thermodynamics,
and I went through the calculations
and understood wetting angles and things like that.
But to see it here in action in microgravity,
it brings it home in a really different sense,
and it really fires up your imagination.
And you look at this.
I mean, can I make a glove out of a liquid?
Can I do something? Can you use a protective glove?
How can I use this in systems
to design hydraulic systems or fluid systems
or use fluids even as control mechanisms
in other kinds of systems?
It's all new.
It's all interesting. It's all exciting.
Think. Use your imagination. What could you do with this?
I can change the shape of my hand,
and the water just fits right around it
and just flows with it.
Isn't that interesting?
So, that, my friends,
is why we come up here and we do experiments.
We have phenomena like this that we don't see on the Earth,
and we don't know what it means,
and we don't know how we can use it,
and we don't know what we don't know,
so we'll have to see what else we discover
as we spend more time here in microgravity
and we move on to the Moon and Mars
and even more interesting and unique environments.
So, we carefully clean this up so I don't make a mess,
and I want to say, again,
thank you for stopping by the Space Station today.
I hope you enjoyed your stop.
I wish you could come here
and look out the window with us sometime,
but at least try and find some of the pictures.
And think about what I just showed you
and all of the other things that we're doing up here
that we really are trying to understand
and things that we'll discover
because we don't know they exist yet.
And imagine our future. It'll be very nice.