A former NASA engineer and now-YouTuber has created a viral sensation with a video documenting efforts to ship an egg to close space to check if it cracks up on touchdown.
Mark Rober conceived the notion of seeing if an egg might survive a touchdown on a mattress following a fall from excessive up within the stratosphere, or close to space.
Collectively together with his group and aided by different former personnel from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Rober settled on an experiment consisting of an egg held by the tip of a rocket-shaped automobile and carried to an altitude of over 100,000 ft — about 19 miles (30.5 kilometers) — by a high-altitude balloon earlier than falling again to Earth. The rocket, armed with fins for steering, would goal the mattress and launch the egg to freefall from round 300 ft (100 meters) up.
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If that sounds easy, it proved to be something however. What adopted was an exacting, three-year odyssey of scrubbed launches, “dumb failures,” misplaced helium and foolish voices, GPS points, eggs misplaced within the pursuit of science and way more.
Early failures led to what Rober described as his “final cellphone a buddy.” This meant calling on his buddy Adam Steltzner, who you would possibly “acknowledge as this man from after we landed Curiosity on Mars,” Rober mentioned.
Curiosity’s 2012 landing marked the debut of NASA’s rocket-powered sky crane landing system, which additionally received the company’s Perseverance rover down safely in February 2021.
With that caliber of help readily available, it is no shock that the final word end result was success, in additional methods than one. Rober’s 27-minute video has already been seen greater than 21 million occasions since its launch on Nov. 25. Test it out your self to see what all of the fuss is about.
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