MICROGRAVITY MATTERS: FLOATING OUR EXPERIMENTS IN SPACE We've all heard the idea that, in a vacuum, feathers and cannonballs fall at the same rate. It's pretty hard to test theories like that here on Earth, where a whole lot of outside influences can affect our results. Call it shake, rattle and roll--without perfect conditions, we can't be very precise or very sure. We're lucky, though, because the coming of the space age has opened up opportunities we've never had before. Space is perhaps one of the best laboratories of all. It's vast, quiet, and relatively free from disturbances. We can check out how things come together in such an untroubled environment--crystals, metals, clouds of atoms and more. We can learn how liquids flow, fires burn, and life adapts. By placing our experiments in freefall around the Earth, we can even remove most of the effect that gravity can have. That's what we mean by "microgravity." Curious how it all works outside of the context we know so well on Earth? Come see what we know, what we predict, and what we hope to learn through our experiments in space. Last Updated: