Art

Ice Without Gravity

A thin ice wafer grown in microgravity, photographed between crossed polarizers.

Astronaut Don Pettit is back in space, and that means lots of awesome microgravity experiments. Here, he grew thin wafers of ice in microgravity in a -95 degree Celsius freezer. Then he took the ice wafers and photographed them between crossed polarizers, creating this colorful image. The colors highlight different crystal orientations within the ice and give us a hint about how the freezing front formed and expanded. I can’t wait to see more examples! (Image credit: D. Pettit/NASA; via Ars Technica; submitted by J. Shoer)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.