Sunday, January 20, 2013

Cold Welding

This is COOL. Did you know that in space, if two pieces of metal touch, they become one piece. It doesn't happen on Earth because our atmosphere puts a layer of oxidized material on the surface of the metal.

My first thought was how in the world do they work with anything in space. I would think this would be a problem when they went to use a wrench on something. Then I thought maybe they coat everything with rubber or something. Nope, apparently anything brought up from Earth has the oxidation already.

I'm not going to try to go into the science on the topic. But if you want to know more, here is the wikipedia link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_welding 


How's that for a cool factoid! (Get it... cool... LOL)


-Red

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2 comments:

  1. I've never actually tried to weld anything. I would imagine it's a lot harder than it appears. Thanks for the link.

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