Cosmic experiments on a floating lab: Notes on the future, from ISS

Fire, water, sleep, matter... everything works differently in zero-gravity. So, experiments on ISS tend to throw up surprises. Here are some ongoing ones.

At 400 km from the surface of Earth, a very different rulebook for physics kicks in.

Take fire. On Earth, gravity helps shape a typical flame. Away from Earth’s atmosphere, small flames tend to be rounder. (NASA)

In the absence of gravity and oxygen, fire behaves differently, as does water. Materials acquire new melting points. Atoms clump together, in ways that hold new hope for quantum technology.

The International Space Station (ISS) has served as a laboratory for all this and more. How does the human body react to time in space? How can recycling systems be refined? Can plant life

ISS astronauts captured a view of the Sarychev volcano in Japan, as they floated above it in 2009. Over the years, images from ISS have helped track the onset and impact of natural disasters, weather systems, and the climate crisis. (NASA)

Planet monitoring: The space station offers a unique perspective across more than 90% of inhabited regions on Earth. A number of instruments on board monitor changes in oceans, air (and energy cycles), vegetation, geological hazards, seasons. Footage has helped track and assess the impacts of floods, wildfires, superstorms, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. Images taken via the space station now form an archive of climate-change impact, as maps see their outlines shift.

A fifth state of matter: In 2018, scientists aboard the ISS generated the fifth state of matter (in addition to solid, liquid, gas and plasma), Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC).

BEC occurs when atoms are cooled to near-absolute zero and clump together, behaving like a single entity that exists between the physical world and the quantum world.

BEC was first achieved on Earth 25 years ago, but the microgravity and super-low temperatures of space make it exponentially easier to create and study them in an environment such as the ISS Cold Atom Lab.

They take less power to produce, and survive longer there, lasting for over a second, compared to a few hundredths of a second here on Earth. Why does any of this matter? Studying BEC, physicists believe, could be a key to unlocking new quantum technologies.