The Bremen Drop Tower
zarm.uni-bremen.de
The Bremen Drop Tower
1–10 of 36 posts
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#2One of the applications for these sorts of microgravity conditions is the creation of large quantum superpositions, especially doing interferometry (roughly, double-slit experiments) with Bose-Einstein condensates.
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#3I would think many countries have disused mineshafts that might be good candidates for a far longer drop
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#4How does it compare to zero-G planes (vomit comet)? These planes can provide much more than 10 seconds of weightlessness, do it a dozen of times per flight without exceeding 2g of acceleration. Much bigger volume, much bigger payload, people can use it, it looks better in every aspect. By comparison, the drop tower can do three 10-second experiments per day, and the acceleration/deceleration look quite violent.
If you want to get in and have a trip, it costs around $5-10k. So judging by this price, it doesn't seem that the expense is high enough to justify building an apparatus that looks quite expensive.
I'm sure that there is a very good reason for drop towers to exist, I just don't know which one.
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#5I would think many countries have disused mineshafts that might be good candidates for a far longer drop
It isn't sufficient to just have a deep hole in the ground. You need a vacuum too!
I had to poke around to find this: "Before the experiment, 18 high-performance pumps make sure that the drop tube is almost free of air containing only one ten thousandth of the normal air pressure. Due to the vacuum, the air resistance is so low that the Bremen Drop Tower can provide one of the best quality of microgravity - in some aspects even better than on the International Space Station (ISS)"
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#6How does it compare to zero-G planes (vomit comet)? These planes can provide much more than 10 seconds of weightlessness, do it a dozen of times per flight without exceeding 2g of acceleration. Much bigger volume, much bigger payload, people can use it, it looks better in every aspect. By comparison, the drop tower can do three 10-second experiments per day, and the acceleration/deceleration look quite violent. If yo…
There are plenty of very good reasons:
zero-G planes are only mostly zero-g. They fly a parabolic trajectory, so their body actually rotates about the center of mass while flying.
Also, their weightlessness is not as well controlled as a drop tower's.
The cost you've listed is for a single passenger.
You know what's more expensive to build and operate than a pressure controlled tube on the ground? A pressure controlled tube with jet engines operated by pilots.
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#7I would think many countries have disused mineshafts that might be good candidates for a far longer drop
Now you just need to retrofit a zero-gravity environment into the disused mineshaft..
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#8I would think many countries have disused mineshafts that might be good candidates for a far longer drop
It isn't sufficient to just have a deep hole in the ground. You need a vacuum too! I had to poke around to find this: "Before the experiment, 18 high-performance pumps make sure that the drop tube is almost free of air containing only one ten thousandth of the normal air pressure. Due to the vacuum, the air resistance is so low that the Bremen Drop Tower can provide one of the best quality of microgravity - in some a…
> in some aspects even better than on the International Space Station (ISS)
Woa, does anyone know in what way this tower provides less gravity than the space station?
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#9Oh, and there's a user's manual!
https://www.zarm.uni-bremen.de/fileadmin/images/droptower/do...
Re: The Bremen Drop Tower
#10Great to see this on hacker news. I can see the tower from my office.