Randy
“Komrade” Bresnik was selected as an astronaut in 2004. He was commissioned as
a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps in May 1989. During his military
career, he became a F/A-18 Test Pilot and was eventually deployed to Kuwait to
fly combat missions in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
A veteran of
STS-129, he has also trained as a Cave-a-naut with the European Space Agency to
test living deep beneath the Earth’s surface as well as an Aquanaut for NASA’s
Extreme Environment Mission Operation (NEEMO) 19. Bresnik is currently a part
of the Expedition 52/53 crew that launched in July 2017. On October 5, 2017,
Bresnik performed his third spacewalk, along with Mark VandeHei.
Away,
these gadgets have taken the children space by storm. They came out of nowhere,
and they're already so hot that schools are banning them – it is the ‘fidget
spinners’, the biggest fad of 2017. These decidedly low-tech devices have
become a must-have for kids, to the point where they're an even more popular
topic anything else. The spinners are simple (and cheap) gadgets that spin in
your hand. They come with an inline skate and ball bearings, and can spin for 2
minutes or more while you're working, hanging out with friends or trying to
relax. In case, you have not seen or
played around, inside the three-spoke fidget spinner, is an area you hold with a finger and thumb.
Then, with another finger, you flick one of the spokes and let the spinner spin
!the toy consists of a ball-bearing in
the center of a multi-lobed flat structure made from metal or plastic designed
to spin along its axis with little effort.
Fidget
spinners became popular toys in April 2017, although similar devices had been
invented as early as 1993. Whether it
can really relieve people of their stress is not for sure, however, they are
used even on International Space Station, makes an
interesting news !! Sciencealerts.com
reports that astronauts on the ISS have
finally got their hands on what was briefly the trendiest contraption in our
part of the universe. And watching it spin in microgravity is enough to make
the toy look cool again.
NASA
astronaut Randy Bresnik, who is currently aboard the space station as part of
Expedition 52/53, shared a video over the weekend of him and his colleagues
playing with a fidget spinner.The team performs a series of tricks with the
NASA-branded (of course) spinner, pretending to spin along with it in various
directions as they float through the microgravity of the space station.For
example, flight engineer Mark T. VandeHei holds the fidget spinner while he
himself does full rotations along a horizontal plane; another crew member Joe
Acaba does dizzying somersaults while the fidget spinner rotates in his hand.
But
as fun and nauseating as that is to watch, the best part is, of course, seeing
the fidget spinner freely floating through the air while continuing to spin.
You can even see the iconic toy floating against a backdrop of Earth as seen
through the ISS cupola windows. .. .. ….. andas it turns out, microgravity does
make a fidget spinner act differently than what we can achieve down on the
ground.
"In
a fidget spinner, you hold the centre of one ball bearing, the outer bearing
race spins around, and the outer parts of the fidget spin with the outer
bearing race," physicist Paul Doherty from the Exploratorium in San
Francisco explained to Live Science earlier this year.The smoother the action
in that central bearing race, the less friction there is and the toy can spin
for longer. But in space, the centre part doesn't stay still."Allowing the
fidget spinner to float reduces the bearing friction by permitting the rate of
the central ring and outer spinner to equalise, and the whole thing spins as a unit,"
NASA explains in the video description.
Indeed,
if you watch closely when Bresnik lets go of the spinner and lets it float
around, you notice that the NASA logo stands still at first, but quickly starts
rotating along with the rest of the device.Now, at first you might think that
in space a fidget spinner would spin for much longer, but as it turns out,
there's still plenty of friction happening in the central ball bearing to make
the spin eventually slow down.
Interesting
little play thing !
With
regards – S. Sampathkumar
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