SPACE CATS !!! - Smarter Every Day 85

Hey, it's me D. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day! So, a couple of weeks ago, I asked a question here on Smarter Every Day in hopes that it would be beamed up to the space station so the astronauts could answer. Well, that happened! Why don't we take the next question on YouTube?

I'm Destin from Huntsville, Alabama. This is sad and spoty on the International Space Station. If you're free falling in one position without touching anything, with no spin, is it possible to wiggle in such a way that you're able to rotate to a different angular position and then stop? On Smarter Every Day, we demonstrated this with a high-speed camera and a cat, who is a non-holonomic system and can do this by extending his legs, arching his back, and twisting in a very specific pattern. So can humans do this on orbit?

You want to say hey to the astronauts? "Hey, thank you! We look up to you guys!"

Okay, well that's a great question. Uh, we don't have any cats on board, but we have a medical doctor who maybe can try to demonstrate the, yeah, next best thing to a cat. So he's going to try to demonstrate for you. Yes indeed, you can do this.

So he's going to get out here and stop himself in open space, and he's going to show you how he can turn himself around. So, he can't change his angular momentum, but he can change his body position and move himself to an nor orientation. So I hope you believe that what you saw happen with the cat isn't a mystery and that it can happen in space too. Great question!

So needless to say, I'm very excited about how this went down. Stie has one more question, by the way. "What's your question?"

"Why do you not have a cat on board?"

So one day, I hope to do research on the International Space Station myself. So I thought it'd be pretty cool if I took a time hack and figured out exactly where the guys were when we were talking. Turns out, when they started listening to my question, they were over the top of Ecuador. And in the 70 seconds that we talked, they buzzed across the equator over Peru, which is cool 'cause I spend a lot of time in Peru and into Colombia.

I also thought it was pretty cool that after they answered the question, you can see Chris Hadfield over to the side. You can see the gears turning in his head, and I think when the camera started flipping off, he started doing a little test himself. He thinks like me; he wants to figure things out, which is good to have people like that on the space station.

You heard me say that I look up to you, but I'm not trying to be funny or anything like that. I actually do watch the International Space Station pass over my house. The tool I use is heavens-above.com. You can go, and you can enter where your house is, and it'll tell you the next times that the ISS is going to pass overhead. It's really awesome; it even tells you where to look!

Anyway, so I recommend going to do that, but warning, if you do that, you're going to have to turn your computer off and walk outside the house and actually observe some real science. So maybe you should do that.

So I'd like to leave you with this: you are bound on the earth like I am, but there is a human that is an ambassador for you in a weightless environment up on the International Space Station, and he tweets every day. All you have to do is follow these guys. They're up there; they're going to pipe down pictures that they take every day, and they're really interesting. All you have to do is not be lazy and go look at what they're doing. It's really cool!

Also, you should follow NASA; they have good stuff every day. For some reason, if you want to follow a less interesting guy, I'm right here. Feel free to look at my stuff as well.

Anyway, I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day! That was awesome. Have a good one! 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.