A French astronaut has been giving science lessons about the effects of zero gravity in space to inspire the public about space exploration.
Sophie Adenot blasted off to the International Space Station in February, where she has been conducting 200 experiments in microgravity over eight months.
In her latest video post from the ISS, she showed how water could be turned into a lens, and then tinted into a blue filter using the food colouring it absorbs from a sweet.
In the footage, Adenot first catches a floating ball of water using a ring attached to a handle, which she has made herself. The weightless water sticks to the edges of the ring, creating a lens.
The astronaut’s face initially appears upside down through the water as with convex lenses. She then blows air into the liquid with a straw, creating a bubble. This reverses the image in the lens, making it appear the right way round.
Then, Ms Adenot adds a blue candy-coated chocolate peanut to the water, and the edible blue dye tints the lens. “If I wait long enough, the water will be tinted blue, and it will be fun to see how to create a blue filter,” she said.
She then removes the washed out sweet and eats it, leaving the blue-colour water in the ring. “We have a lens with a blue filter. That was just to have fun. See you soon for more adventures,” she said.
Ms Adenot’s posts draw attention and questions from space colleagues as well as the general public.
“I admire the way Sophie is so busy but makes time for fun little experiments that teach us a little about microgravity,” one space professional wrote in response to her video on social media. "The water behaves so differently to on Earth and yet Sophie looks totally at home in microgravity, like a space mermaid."
A French school teacher asked how the body was able to swallow the water and the sweet without gravity. Another admirer called her the “star of the Cirque des Etoiles”.
This week, Ms Adenot shared pictures that she took of smoke coming out of the active volcano Mount Etna.
And, in a nod to fellow Europeans going through this week’s heatwave, she posted a video of how to use water in space as a glue to stick a skimboard on her fingers. “Skimboarding in space is very tricky because it just floats every where. The trick is to use the properties of water,” she said.
“My fingers can skip to the skimboard. On Earth you cannot do this because gravity is a force that is way stronger than surface tension."
Ms Adenot is part of the Epsilon mission, which will study the effects of microgravity on the human body and tools that can support astronaut’s health on future crewed missions to the Moon or Mars. This includes testing the EchoFinder ultrasound scanner that uses augmented reality and AI, and tools to measure her blood pressure, arterial blood flow, heart rate, temperature and breathing throughout the trip.
She has also taken thale cress and mizuna seeds to germinate on the ISS, in an experiment that will also involve thousands of schools in France.
The astronaut first trained as an aviation engineer and was a helicopter pilot for the French Air Force, before being accepted on the European Space Agency’s astronaut corps in 2022. She is the second French woman to have joined the corps, after her heroine, Claudie Haignere.
“Believe in your dreams, believe in yourself, and believe in that little nothing, that epsilon, that can change everything …” she said from the ISS on International Women’s Day.
