gogga posts stuff

Who said Germans are OK to go to space? Especially the ones that look like this:

LOL! OK, OK, I’m just kidding!

Found this article posted on the German Aerospace Center site to be quite interesting.

Look at that! There is medicine, plasma engineering and physics, biotechnology, radiation research, etc etc etc. These guys are doing everything! Quite cool, if you ask me.

Personally, I’ve never really “looked up to the stars”… But perhaps I should. There are some quite fascinating phenomena that take place when you remove gravity from the equation. I’ve done a little bit of work on Coulomb crystals where the lattice sites were simply too tiny to feel the gravity. Too bad I have been looking elsewhere for cookies and am generally neglecting that initial effort. In space, however, even cows are weightless…

Anyway, read it and enjoy! Here are a few lines:

Plasma crystal research

The very first scientific experiment that was carried out on the ISS commenced in March 2001. This was a series of experiments that is still continuing today to research plasma crystals by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching (Co-ordinator: G. Morfill). This involves micro-particles arranged so that they are floating in a plasma at room temperature. The lattice-shaped arrangement can be used as an experimental model system for the atomic structure of a solid. Thus scientists can examine in detail the melting of a solid using individual particle movements in terms of time and space. Under certain conditions they are also able to analyse flowing liquids and gases at elemental micro particle level.