Discoveries on the Space Shuttle Columbia's Final Mission

[Tuckerfan]

Space shuttle Columbia still contributing to science.

Using data recovered from a damaged computer hard-drive that was aboard the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, scientists have recently learned more about why the act of shaking a material can quickly transform it into something completely different.

One of the best examples of this phenomenon is ordinary ketchup. Shake the bottle and the semi-solid paste becomes a runny liquid. Food scientists do the shaking in a controlled way by putting ketchup (and other processed foods) into a rheometer (rheo, meaning "flow") to see how its viscosity -- the scientific word for stickiness -- decreases when shaken.

To do a proper study, the experiment needed a zero-gravity environment. And so up it went in Columbia.

Pretty amazing that they were able to recover the data.