Drop an antacid into water here on Earth and you’ve got yourself a glass of fizzy water. Do the same thing up on the space station, and you’ve just made yourself a disco ball.


International Space Station crew member Terry Virts shoot this footage showing just what happens when an antacid tablet is dissolved into a floating clump of water up on the ISS. The results are like so:


The demonstration is not just to show the strange fluid dynamics that you can spot on the ISS, although those are certainly on display here, it’s also about the hardware used to capture it.



In the resupply mission earlier this year, one of the new items brought aboard was an incredibly high-resolution camera, capable of shooting in up to 6K. This was a test run for the new camera, and the detail is exceptionally sharp—you can see all the bubbles as they shoot outwards from the water they were dissolved. NASA plans to use the new camera to broadcast videos from the ISS, but it’s also going to double as a piece of lab equipment to document—in incredibly small detail—the experiments they do up there.

