Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

recent posts

email me

Boomerangs in Space

Is this unexpected? I think so.

In an unprecedented experiment, a Japanese astronaut has thrown a boomerang in space and confirmed it flies back much like on Earth.

Astronaut Takao Doi “threw a boomerang and saw it come back” during his free time on March 18 at the International Space Station, a spokeswoman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said on Friday.

Doi threw the boomerang after a request from compatriot Yasuhiro Togai, a world boomerang champion.

“I was very surprised and moved to see that it flew the same way it does on Earth,” the Mainichi Shimbun daily quoted the 53-year-old astronaut as telling his wife in a chat from space.

The space agency said a videotape of the experiment would likely be released later.

Posted in

4 responses to “Boomerangs in Space”

  1. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    Everyone supposes that there is nothing new to be discovered in Newtonian mechanics. I wonder. Anyone my age who studied freshman physics will have been subjected to the consensus account of how bicycles stay upright. Since then, I gather, some simple experiments have falsified that account. Hey ho, we can only be glad that important stuff like the climate is so easy to model that even rather inept physicists can triumph at it.

    Like

    Reply
  2. DaninVan Avatar
    DaninVan

    No mention in the article of whether Takao Doi was indoors or outdoors during his experiment…;)

    Like

    Reply
  3. Dom Avatar
    Dom

    How was the boomerang made? Was one end of the “Y” “heavier” (if that’s the word) than the other?

    Like

    Reply
  4. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    I have absolutely no idea. We’ll just have to wait for the video.

    Like

    Reply

Leave a reply to Mick H Cancel reply