14 DAY TRIAL // Drinking in zero gravity is quite a difficult and often messy job, which is not really good news for astronauts. This came even harder for astronaut Don Pettit, currently aboard the International Space Station, who is very fond of coffee. Luckily, his creativity and know how have served him just right once again, as he has come up with a new way of drinking a cup of coffee in no gravity conditions, a feat for which many will thank him in the years to come.
Zero gravity conditions cause liquids to float around in spherical blobs, making it extremely difficult to control them. Hot coffee can pose real threats, related to scalding and dirtying; that is why astronauts generally used to drink it (and other liquids) from silver bags, using straws. But let's face it, sipping is no way to enjoy coffee, as most of you may easily imagine. So, Pettit, who is famous for his handiness and finding solutions to everything, has also found a way around this.
"We can suck our coffee from a bag, but to drink it from a cup is hard to do because you can't get the cup up to get the liquid out, and it's also easy to slosh," explained Pettit for Mission Control as he sent a video to visually share his invention to those back on Earth. So, he ripped out a page from his Flight Data File mission book and folded it into a shape resembling that of a plane's wing, which uses the laws of physics in order to deal with the liquids' surface tension and control its movement. It's the same principle that helps spacecraft engines draw fuel in zero-G conditions.
"The way this works is, the cross section of this cup looks like an airplane wing. The narrow angle here will wick the coffee up," showed the scientist, quoted by LiveScience. "This may very well be what future space colonists end up using when they want to have a celebration and do a toast." Now, said Pettit, "You can enjoy a cup of coffee in a weightless environment without having to sip it from a bag. You can just keep sipping and sipping clear down to the last drop in the cup."