Video: NASA to create coolest spot in ISS to study gravity, dark matter
New Delhi : NASA is planning to inject an ice chest-sized box to International Space Station (ISS), where it will be deployed to freeze gas items to create coolest space in the universe. A laser, vaccum chamber and an electromagnetic knife will be used to annul all energy from the gas particals to make them motionless.
NASA has named the whole setup of design as Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL). The device will be sent to the space in August aboard the SpaceX CRS-12.
"Studying these hyper-cold atoms could reshape our understanding of matter and the fundamental nature of gravity," PTI quotes CAL Project Scientist Robert Thompson of JPL.
"The experiments we'll do with the Cold Atom Lab will give us insight into gravity and dark energy - some of the most pervasive forces in the universe," said Thompson.
When atoms are cooled to extreme temperatures, as they will be inside of CAL, they can form a distinct state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. In this state, familiar rules of physics recede and quantum physics begins to take over.
Matter can be observed behaving less like particles and more like waves. NASA has never before created or observed Bose-Einstein condensates in space. On Earth, the pull of gravity causes atoms to continually settle towards the ground, meaning they are typically only observable for fractions of a second.
But on the International Space Station, ultra-cold atoms can hold their wave-like forms longer while in freefall. That offers scientists a longer window to understand physics at its most basic level.
Thompson estimated that CAL will allow Bose-Einstein condensates to be observable for up to five to 10 seconds and future development of the technologies used on CAL could allow them to last for hundreds of seconds.
Five scientific teams plan to conduct experiments using the Cold Atom Lab. The results of these experiments could potentially lead to a number of improved technologies, including sensors, quantum computers and atomic clocks used in spacecraft navigation, NASA said.
With Input from IANS
