Historic lecture broadcast live to millions of students all over China. ABOUT 1,000 Form 4, 5 and 6 students from the Beijing No 2 Middle School were glued to the projection screen in their classrooms to watch the historic lecture broadcast live from space together with millions of pupils and students in China. Many students from the school could not take their eyes off the 40-minute physics lesson in which three Chinese taikonauts on board the Tiangong-1 orbiter first showed how they meditated airborne and measured their weight using a special scale, designed based on the Newton’s second law of motion, in a gravity-free environment. Wang Yaping, China’s second female taikonaut and the teacher in charge of the lecture, then demonstrated how a gyro in a high-speed rotation motion could actually maintain the position of its axis in space like that on Earth. She pushed a static gyro in the air and then spanned another gyro. The static gyro rolled forward but the rotating gyro kept its axis intact. She noted that the fixed axis concept of the high-speed rotating gyro has been widely used in the aerospace field, saying that a wide range of gyroscopes had been installed in the Tiangong-1 orbiter to measure its flight pattern accurately. Fifth former Wu Tong said she was especially fascinated with the experiment conducted by Wang to examine the movement of a small ball tied with a string to a holder fixed on a metal plate. “Previously, we have been taught on the theory and not the practical side of it. It is rather difficult to simulate a vacuum environment.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 04:49:54 +0000
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