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The tower built just to have objects dropped from it: 475-ft rocket-shaped building is helping scientists understand outer space
- ZARM tower in Bremen, Germany, provides nearly 10 seconds of free-fall
- Places subjects under the microgravity conditions they would find in space
- It also has a catapult mode to propel subjects rapidly to the top of the tower
The drop tower in Bremen, Germany, provides nearly 10 seconds of free-fall to anyone who wants to study the effects of weightlessness on different objects.
Also known as the ZARM tower, the building works as an Earth-based version of the International Space Station by briefly placing subjects under the microgravity conditions they would find in space.
As well as the affects of microgravity on fish, the tower has been used to better understand fluid dynamics, process engineering, combustion and materials science.
For instance, scientists also used it to understand the behaviour of something called Bose–Einstein condensate- a cloud of ultra-cold atoms which occupy the same quantum state and so act like one supersize quantum particle.
The researchers placed the Bose–Einstein condensate in a capsule and dropped it down the shaft inside.
The idea was to get the quantum object in free fall to watch it expand during a second or so of weightlessness.
Such timescales of the condensate’s evolution would be difficult to replicate in laboratory setting because gravity tugs at the atoms and skews the results.
Since 2007, the ZARM facility has also offered a catapult mode in which the capsule is propelled vertically to the top of the tower and then drops back down the deceleration chamber.
Using this mode the microgravity experiment time can be extended from 4.74 to 9.3 seconds.
Unlike the drop mode, the capsule and its enclosed experiment experience an acceleration of up to 35g before the experiment begins.
The tower’s current experiments can be viewed here.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2442432/ZARM-tower-Bremen-built-just-objects-dropped-360-feet-ground.html#ixzz2gqJZ3j4G
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