Look carefully! This is an altitude of 30,000 meters and an egg is placed inside the device.
3, 2, 1…. Landing!
The egg didn’t crack when I took it out!
This video is the work of former NASA engineer Youtuber Mark Rober. Currently, this video of “Eggs Falling from Space” has exceeded 28 million views on Youtube, with 830,000 likes.
A neurobiologist laughs at himself: I just brought home some eggs from the supermarket and one broke. 1 point for engineers, 0 points for neuroscientists.
So how did he get the eggs to heaven? And how did it land safely?
World record for throwing the highest egg
For this experiment, the site is deep in the desert and it takes 6 hours to get there.
Mark Robb and his team used a zero-pressure helium balloon to fly the eggs into space.
This process went very smoothly: after about 2 hours, the balloon rose to an altitude of almost 30,000 meters above the ground. Strictly speaking, 30,000 meters isn’t considered space, but it’s not low either.
Everyone stood in the desert and saw the balloon fly higher and higher carrying a bunch of equipment. But when everyone was clapping, an accident happened. The balloon opened 2 minutes early due to the tangling of the wire that connects it to the rest of the equipment.
When the device quickly fell, Mark Robb became concerned.
In the chaos, if the parachute fails to deploy, the eggs and device will drop rapidly, at speeds of up to 240km/h.
“This speed is far beyond the speed limit that eggs can normally handle.” Mark Robb said helplessly.
Fortunately, the parachute deployed and the egg that finally landed was intact.
Look at Mark Robb’s expression:
Their success means that the “High Altitude Egg Throwing” trial was successful and set a new record.
Why don’t eggs break?
For this day, Mark Robb and his team have been preparing for 3 years. At first he wanted to try and drop an egg on the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, to make it land smoothly. But after thinking about it, he decided to send the egg into “space”.
The initial idea was simple. The small rocket carrying the egg is lifted up by a helium balloon, then separated, and then falls. The small rocket is responsible for adjusting the position, and then separates from the egg at a certain height.
Eventually, the egg lands on a soft pad on the ground.
Mark Robb first calculated and calculated that the terminal speed of free fall of a single egg is about 120 km/h. That is to say, if the altitude is high enough, gravity and air resistance will reach an equilibrium at this speed, and then it will fall at a constant speed.
So the crux of the issue is whether the mat can provide enough cushioning for eggs at this rate.
So, they found a mattress to do an experiment, and with a “catapult” type catapult, even though the speed of the egg reached 133.5 kilometers per hour, the golden body was still intact.
With this verification, Mark Robb is full of confidence and plans to use a helium balloon to send the device with the egg to an altitude of 30,000 meters, then drop it. The egg loading device is designed as a “rocket”, with a movable tail, which can adjust the direction of the entire device as it falls, and finally drop it onto a large carpet.
Since the temperature at an altitude of 30,000 meters can be as low as minus 25 degrees Celsius, to prevent the eggs from being damaged by freezing, they also attached a heating device.
But since the first experiment, things haven’t gone so well. Due to the unpredictable wind direction and strength, the device is always disturbed in the process of flying and falling, and its landing position cannot be predicted.
And the declining positions are varied, every day is a new accident…
At times, Mark Robb and his associates used the folding chair as a shield out of fear of being hit while checking the landing spot through the monitor.
Next, they turned to Adam Steltzner, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Adam has been on many missions to Mars, and upon learning of the situation, he suggested:
Don’t pursue precision landing on carpet, why not put the “mat” directly into the rocket.
So, Mark Robb et al designed a whole set of buffer deceleration equipment and put it into the rocket. Among them, the cushioning material for the eggs uses the inflatable air cushions used by the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers.
In addition, they also installed a deceleration parachute that opens during landing and some of its nylon material comes from Curiosity Mars Exploration Rover scraps.
But after some improvements, they were unsuccessful. The reason is that when the site was about to fly, they found that the upper and lower parts of the rocket could not be tightly assembled, which may lead to the disintegration of the device during the ascent and descent. In addition, even the helium balloons they used suffered minor damage from the repeated experiments. This is the only helium balloon they have available…
Fortunately, Mark Robb and others didn’t give up.
The team reassembled the rocket’s equipment, fixed connection points, added a jacket and hoped it would be more reliable at launch. Since there could only be one chance, they held an extra hand.
Connect the other egg to the heating electrode, wrap it with bubble wrap, put it into a ball, and lift it with other devices. Even if the egg in the rocket device is broken, even if there is no deceleration parachute, this can be used alternatively.
As for the helium balloon’s hidden dangers, they used equipment to measure the strength of the material and believed that the current damage could still ensure that the balloon could complete its mission to the sky. Eventually they succeeded. The parachute deployed successfully, the airbags also worked, and the egg in the rocket device was intact.
Also, the eggs in the backup device didn’t break after falling at high speed.
Former NASA engineers
Finally, let’s meet Mark Robb, who is “launching eggs into space” this time. He is a former NASA engineer who participated in the development of the previous generation Mars rover Curiosity. Now, Mark Robb is an entertaining master of Youtube, relying on a number of interesting and eye-catching DIY video content, with 20 million fans.
His video themes include “How to Peel a Watermelon”, “Mountain-making Jelly Pool”, “Building a Squirrel Maze”, etc., all of which have exceeded 100 million views. He also made the largest foam gun, breaking the Guinness World Record.
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