Watch: UAE astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi’s tricky question about iPad floating on International Space Station goes viral
'Najmonaut' on long mission asks ‘smart people’ to explain strange movement of device
Dubai: A video of UAE astronaut Sultan Al Neyadi asking a tricky question about the movement of an iPad in the microgravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS) has gone viral.
The post was seen over 235,000 times, with over 60,000 views for the video, within two hours of him uploading it on Twitter on Monday afternoon.
Posing the question to “smart people”, Al Neyadi, who is on the longest Arab space mission, shot the video in Arabic. The Najmonaut (Arab astronaut) is seen flipping an iPad aboard the ISS in different ways.
When he flips it horizontally, he points out that the iPad rotates either sideways or forward and backward. It also moves up and down if pushed vertically from its edges.
‘Why does this happen?’
However, a curious phenomenon occurs when the object is held vertically and flipped. Unlike in the previous cases, the iPad does not continue to rotate in the same direction to which it was flipped. It twists and turns and moves diagonally as well.
Why does this happen? Al Neyadi posed this question to everyone, while adding “it’s for smart people. I am waiting for your comments”.
On Monday, Al Neyadi and three other NASA SpaceX Crew-6 members completed over 10 days after being lifted off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on March 2. They reached the space station on March 3.
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200 experiments
Al Neyadi’s six months aboard the ISS will be the longest ever space mission by an Arab. According to NASA, Crew-6 will carry out over 200 science experiments and technology demonstrations during the mission. These include Al Neyadi conducting at least 20 experiments, apart from the tasks consigned by Nasa and doing maintenance work on the orbiting station. Al Neyadi will be conducting dental and postural experiments in space for the universities in the UAE.
His educational messages from space will also be featured on the ELF in Space website. In its first edition last Thursday, the programme taught students about the importance of doing exercise in space and how the astronauts actually exercise on the ISS.