The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.
Find out more about space activities in our 23 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations.
Exploring our Solar System and unlocking the secrets of the Universe
Go to topicProtecting life and infrastructure on Earth and in orbit
Go to topicUsing space to benefit citizens and meet future challenges on Earth
Go to topicMaking space accessible and developing the technologies for the future
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SODI-DCMIX hardware at ESA's technical heart ESTEC in The Netherlands.
Fluids and gases are never at rest, even if they appear to be when viewed by the naked eye. Molecules are constantly moving and colliding even though there is no microscope powerful enough to see it. Scientists are interested in observing and measuring how these movements combined with temperature changes lead to it’s the fluid’s constituents redistributing as they reveal important, practical information such as how fluids mix or separate in different conditions.
Creating accurate models of how fluids warm up and spread is harder than it might seem. School physics classes can work out how long it would take to boil a litre of water, but what if the water were mixed with oil or a multitude of different liquids?
A mixture on the International Space Station is free from the constraints of gravity and will only react to temperature. SODI-DCMIX exploits this fact to record concentration gradients in mixtures in space to understand how molecules behave in liquids.
The data from this third version of SODI-DCMIX will be stored on flash disks and returned to the international team of researchers on Earth later this year.