It’s hard to get a run in most media with a positive research story, so when UWA announced it was set to make history by conducting the nation’s first zero gravity experiments, it was not the giant gas conversion machine that first caught FC’s eye, but a couple of scientists tossing around a white football.
Why stop and ponder?
Well we are all pretty simple beasts at heart. Even the great and the good in the big chairs of the nation’s tertiary sector secretly prefer their daily fact intake to be concise and fresh, so while the Zero-gravity experiment normally wouldn’t find space in FC, as one of thousands of important research projects across the nation, the overall package does deserve a moment of your time. Partly because it was International Star Wars Day on Monday, partly because the research is unusual and interesting, and mainly because attempt to hook the interests of community don’t get a lot better than footage of a white footy being tossed around in space.
The key points here:
- It turns out that the University of Western Australia has an International Space Centre, and the good souls there have snagged 46.5 minutes of zero gravity research time in the back of an Airbus A310 kitted out to fly up and down at pace – with half a minute of weightlessness as it performs each parabola.
- The French Space Agency CNES have signed an agreement with UWA to provide space on three flights in October this year, performing a total of 93 parabolic manoeuvres while scientists perform experiments – or maybe just some handball drills – in the back of the plane
- The football being tossed around in some of the vision provided by UWA simply illustrates staff experiencing weightlessness on an earlier flight.
- The ball has to be white so it doesn’t leave any scuff marks on the interior of the plane, and is actually a great tool to engage the wider public (and FC) in the existence of the Space Centre and its projects.
- The headline act for research is an astonishing piece of research by UWA’s Professor Hongqi Sun who is working on a process to turn methane and carbon dioxide into a rocket fuel using sunlight. He is going to test whether the process works in zero gravity, in the hope it may be used as a fuel on Mars.
- Deputy Director of the Centre Larissa Wiese, who is a reformed journo turning her hand to scientific knowledge transfer, said the insights from the research may also be useful to create fuel on Earth. FC this that given the state of the Straight may be a more immediate – albeit less fun – priority for Professor Sun.
- There is also a national comp for an iron-gutted undergrad to snag a spot on one of the flights, affectionately dubbed the Vomit Comet.
- The handballs wouldn’t pass muster on field, and some killjoys could even suggest that spending one of the 93 parabolas tossing a ball around is not the best illustration of high tech researchers hard at work, but I disagree – it is simply a portal opening eyeballs and stopping scrolling long enough to get the real story across.
This is a significant international collaboration, and Deputy Director Wiese was no doubt alive to the reality that a random weightless football pic mid AFL season was the best hope of snagging eyeballs and hearts in States dedicated to The Superior Code.