Diet Coke and Mentos... In Zero Gravity... only on MAKE!


Robert writes-

This last weekend the whole family flew on Space Adventure's G-Force One (just featured last night on Mythbusters). Being science nuts, we spent some time thinking up experiments to do in microgravity, and ended up testing the Diet Coke & Mentos reaction.

We hacked a camera port and mount into a portable glove bag (to contain the mess) and filmed the whole thing with the Casio EX-F1 at 300 frames a second, using light from an emergency exit window. The results were a bit equivocal ("more research is needed, hahahah!") but the video is interesting, as is the story of how the experiment evolved and how we managed to do it.

http://rjwoodhead.blogspot.com/ for the whole story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P01kVKp6MIs for just the video.

We also hacked a hard drive into a gyroscope and flew it, but I won't have the video of that for a few weeks.

Kudos to the Space Adventures people, btw. They went the extra mile to help us work out a way to do the experiment (they are extremely science-friendly) and coordinated with the TSA to ensure that there would be no last minute hiccups.




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Posted by: blubrick on August 29, 2008 at 1:56 AM

Diet Coke and Mentos in space?

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Seriously though, that was pretty cool. I suspect the effects of natural gravity assist the violence of the reaction, because the microgravity version was surprisingly tame compared to other "menticulation" reactions I have seen.

(hmm, preview doesn't show the link - I hope submit lets it through)


Posted by: blubrick on August 29, 2008 at 2:01 AM

Makezine ate my "a href"!

You can see the T-shirt I referred to at http://store.glennz.com/goforlaunch.html



Posted by: Frank on August 29, 2008 at 6:29 AM

A 300 zero g

I did an experiment with glass marbles in zero gravity a year ago.

http://raumwiese.macbay.de/zero-g/PROJECT.html


Posted by: Weak on August 29, 2008 at 12:54 PM

Snoozer

BOOOOORRING!


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