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.
8 thoughts on “Diet Coke and Mentos… In Zero Gravity… only on MAKE!”
Comments are closed.
ADVERTISEMENT
Join Make: Community Today
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)
You can see the T-shirt I referred to at http://store.glennz.com/goforlaunch.html
I did an experiment with glass marbles in zero gravity a year ago.
http://raumwiese.macbay.de/zero-g/PROJECT.html
BOOOOORRING!