Transcript

NARRATOR:

60 Second Adventures in Microgravity. Number Two, The Vomit Comet. When you're on a roller coaster and you feel your stomach being left behind, for that tiny moment, you're experiencing microgravity. And we can use microgravity to study how planets like the Earth are formed when tiny ice and dust particles collide and somehow stick together in space.

To test how this happens, the particles have to be thrown together very gently or else they break up. But at that speed on Earth, gravity acts on them and they don't even reach each other, like a really pathetic snowball fight. So scientists head off on something called a parabolic flight, where a plane travels in a series of huge parabolas, or curves. As it goes over the top of the curve, the pilots adjust the plane's speed to counteract the effect of gravity inside. And for about 22 seconds, we can create a microgravity environment to test these planet-building collisions, just like a four-hour roller-coaster ride, which is why they call it the ‘vomit comet.’

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