Legos in the Lab | Discover Magazine

On Aug. 5, 2011, the Juno spacecraft blasted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral and started out its 5-year journey to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar method. The spacecraft carried a mass of scientific equipment designed to ascertain parameters like the planet’s composition and the total of water present, as properly as map out its gravity discipline. Juno also carried some unusual passengers: three tiny Lego figures. They represented the Roman sky and thunder god Jupiter, his spouse Juno, and Galileo Galilei, the scientist who studied Jupiter’s four largest moons in 1610.  

The Lego figure cargo was intended to market fascination in science and cosmology among children. Each of the place-traveling characters are the identical size as usual Lego figures, but they’re cast in a “distinctive place-grade aluminum,” according to Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator. “They have long gone through all the tests to make sure that they in shape on our spacecraft in a way that is like our other science instruments.” 

Unfortunately, the Lego passengers will face a fiery conclude. The spacecraft is at the moment orbiting Jupiter but it has been given a rigorous departure day in order to remove place particles and avoid a collision with one particular of Jupiter’s 79 moons — which could cause biological contamination. Therefore, in September 2025, Juno will be intentionally de-orbited by minimizing its pace and crashing into the ambiance of Jupiter, exactly where it will burn off up.   

The Lego figures, which traveled about two billion miles from Earth to Jupiter, will meet their destruction in Jupiter’s ambiance. Whichever continues to be of them will possibly reside on Jupiter for billions of many years and whip about at hundreds of miles an hour with the planet’s winds.  

Lego parts have not been confined to place journeys: The iconic yellow figures have assisted groups from a broad assortment of scientific fields. For one particular, they have participated in experiments in so-identified as acoustic time reversal, in which audio waves are centered at a solitary place. The technique was employed by Brigham Youthful researchers to knock over a solitary Lego figure while some others remained upright.

Outside of enabling Lego bowling, centered audio waves could develop sound cancellation by amassing the audio and focusing it somewhere out of earshot. The system could also immediate audio waves on to kidney stones to split them up, or mail audio indicators to submarines that are undetectable by enemies. It may possibly even enable you to chat to a solitary human being in a crowd without some others listening to. 

In one more exploration asset, Lego figures can endure excessive chilly. The UK’s Lancaster University’s reduced-temperature physics group cooled a Lego figure to the coldest temperature on Earth, just a couple thousandths of a diploma over complete zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit). The Lego figure survived the ordeal, and so did four bricks assembled in a stack. 

What started out off as an amusing experiment brainstormed in a bar yielded some valuable scientific results — particularly that the stack of Lego bricks supplied superior thermal insulation than the high-priced significant-functionality insulating resources commonly employed in reduced temperature exploration.  

Products with reduced thermal conductivity support isolate components to achieve the extremely reduced temperatures required for this kind of do the job. When they’re clipped with each other,  thermal resistance may possibly emerge from the voids in between adjacent blocks and the fairly modest area of get hold of in between them.

In one more illustration, MIT engineers are creating a method created completely of Lego bricks to go very small quantities of liquid. This invention could support labs do the job much more competently by rushing up drug safety tests procedures, for illustration. And European House Agency scientist Detlef Koschny built Lego products of the Rosetta space probe and lander to support visualize and display their performance in meetings. 

What tends to make Legos so helpful:  Labs use the plastic bricks because they are made to exact specifications and come in a typical size no subject exactly where they are acquired. This guarantees uniformity in products about the planet.  As well as, Lego-dependent applications can be modular and quickly altered for unique experiments. The copyright for the Lego has expired, allowing for experts to make their own bricks, for illustration, from a unique product. 

The children’s toys in the end deliver an unlimited assortment of buildings created from precision-engineered unit pieces (and charming figures).