CompuServe Messages

I thought the same thing – a flipped normal or a missing face, but I couldn't find anything wrong with the faces in the area of the dark streaks. I assume that there **was** something wrong but I just couldn't find it. We've got a group at work that develops and flys experiments that take advantage of the low gravity environment that is available on the space shuttle or, if they ever build it, the space station. The acceleration levels are in the range of 0.001 to 0.000001 g depending on the amount of residual air drag and the activity level on the orbiter. Density driven convection is what makes warm air rise and cold air sink. If you take away gravity, convection stops. If you take away gravity there is no pressure difference between the top and bottom of a column of liquid. There are a lot of processes that are hard to study on the ground because convection or the hydrostatic head pressure gets in the way. These are the kind of experiments that you can get answers to by taking them into space. The hardware that you use for these experiments is often complex, so I sometimes end up getting the job of putting together an animation that illustrates how it all works. I did a series of animations to illustrate the concepts behind a new-technology furnace that we were designing that showed how it was assembled. In the process they showed why the design was so good. I've also done some work on a couple of other experiments, doing essentially the same thing – showing how the hardware worked.